Taking Em & Leila to start the PCT
Pacific Crest Trailhead
Campo, California
March 2, 2022
The Tesla does many things well. But driving your daughter and her friend and their gear out to the trailhead of the Pacific Crest Trail, way out over the mountains and into the desert, is not one of them.
We were so glad that Em's friend Leila, who had hiked parts of the PCT before with her sister, was going along with Em for the first week of her trek. And we were only about 20 minutes from Campo when I realized that we wouldn't have enough battery life to get to the trailhead and back. I had to turn us around and head for a nearby casino. Unfortunately, their charger was slow as molasses and it would've taken days to get enough juice to get to Campo and back. The nearest super charger was another 40 minutes in the wrong direction, back to San Diego.
We thought about putting them in an Uber and sending them on their own, but Em rightly resisted: "We've been talking about and planning this for over a year. I don't want to start out by climbing into some Uber minivan at a casino."
Leila was a good sport about the delay -- and Jen wasn't too bad either. We drove back to San Diego, charged up the Tesla, then headed back out to Campo. There they headed out about 4pm, about 3 or 4 hours later than we had planned. But in the context of a six-month hike, it hardly matters, and I'm glad that we got to send them off properly.
