Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Comps Missouri Style. Red Robin Rocks! - Day 17

Today we are traveling from Woodland, Kanas to St. Louis, Missouri. This is a bit father than originally planned, but we are trying to get out of the wet weather and get to some better camping weather. Today’s trip takes us through Kansas City where we will meet up with an old friend from the days long before our current reality. In St. Louis, we’ll be camping on Route 66 so we will will have one last re-connection with that special road. 


As we left our motel in Goodland, a blacked out and de-badged Tesla was parked in one of the charging stalls. Oliver was intrigued because the black on black car had no markings (de-badged), dark tinted windows, and tinted headlights. It was a California car so we figured it was another coaster. It was a gentleman traveling with is three kids. We didn’t speak to them as we were on the way out. As we travelled, Oliver and I spent a bit of time talking about why people customize their cars in that way.  We ran in to the group again at the Topeka charging station. There, we spoke with one of the kids, gave him our flyer, and gave him a Tesla HotWheel. They were on their way to New York. So, yes they were doing a coast to coast trip as well. 

At our charging station in Independence, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City, we had arranged to meet with Robert Stringer. For those that don’t know Robert is one of Chris’ friends from our days in Southern California. He used to game with Chris and eventually worked for us at Complete Business Solutions. After working with one of our notorious customers for a while,  Robert eventually moved on to study Physics and eventually do his doctoral work with CERN on the Large Hadron Collider

Before Robert arrived, we met a nice gentleman named Paul Khoury whose wife had just convinced him to purchase a Model X. His awesome new black on black P90 still had the dealer plate. Oliver was checking it out when Paul asked us if we had ever taken a long trip in our Tesla. I guess he ran into the right people to ask. We shared our story with him, talked about our travels, and showed him how to change the charge limit on the car. As a congratulatory gift to Oliver for getting first place in the state math fair, Paul gave us all a comped dinner at his Red Robin restaurant down the street. 

Robert showed up at the charger a little later. We spent a few minutes showing Robert and his twin boys, Nathaniel and Nicholas, the Tesla and proceeded to the restaurant. Nathaniel and Nicholas road with us in the Tesla to the restaurant. We gave them a demonstration of AutoSteer and the Acceleration. They were impressed, but didn’t want anymore demonstrations in city traffic. At the restaurant, we ended up talking about old times and what became of our infamous customers whom Robert went on to work for back in the day. Eventually, the kids got to talking about Minecraft. We spent a little longer than we should have, but had a great time. Thanks to Paul and his staff at the restaurant for serving up a great time.

At our charge stop in Columbia, Missouri, we ran into that blacked our Model S from California again. This time we spoke with the group a bit and found out that they were going to New York and back in 11 days. So, their trip was much more hectic than ours. They told us they were going to visit the replica of Noah’s Ark that was be built. That made me think of the famous riff that Bill Cosby did related to Noah. So, we all listened to part of it and had a laugh. We wished them well on their journey and made our way on to St. Louis. 

We arrived at St. Louis pretty late so we had another after dark camp to setup. This time we installed the rain fly and settled in for a good sleep. 







2 comments:

  1. As the owner of the black on black Tesla, it was a pleasure to meet with you and share in your adventure. We were traveling from Anaheim, California to Palmyra, New York. We started on Saturday at 6 am and pulled into the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky at 8:30 am on Monday.

    Brent, Malena, Stryker and Jaeger

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  2. You guys were definitely scooting right along=. Glad to see you made the Ark ok. Long drives have always been tough on me. Autosteer has tripled my tolerance and made our trip feasible for us.

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