My car still had its snow tires on it and I wasn’t getting them off until like, Tuesday of this week. So I was like, okay, we can’t take my car on the highway ’cause like, it’s gonna be bad with the tires. So we took my husband’s car, which is an electric car. And I thought we’d be fine, range-wise. In fact, I’d even looked for a place we could probably plug it in on our way up there if we stopped for lunch. Um. But we didn’t end up plugging it for, in for lunch, but we went about our business. I really wasn’t thinking about it. And that night, my husband said, “You know, we’re gonna have to charge the car before we get home,” and I was like, “Oh yeah.”
Um, you know, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to have to like, be sitting in the car for like, you know, two hours waiting for it to charge and he said, “No, no, no, it’ll charge really fast if you can find, you know, just find us one of those plugs that has the rapid charging.” I went online to do that and realized only then that the — so, my husband’s car is a Nissan Leaf, and it uses, I’m not gonna pronounce this right, it’s like, I’m gonna call it Chad Demo (CHAdeMO). I’m sure it has a different name, but its charging plug is, is a Chad Demo size, and, um, at the time the car was manufactured, I think they thought more cars would do Chad Demo. But then, and my husband said, GM came out with its electric cars, it decided to use the same kind of plug that Teslas use, and so now most charging stations don’t do Chad Demo. And now, in fact, even Nissan now sells cars with like both plugs, so you can do the other one, but my husband’s car could only do Chad Demo.
And I went online to look, to see, and there were only two places in the entire city of Midland that had Chad, Chad Demo. And I was like, “Oh, great.” So what I told my husband I’d do was, “Well, I will, uh –” We only had 48 miles of charge and, you know, we had to get home. It was like, you know, 100 miles or more to get home. I said, “Well, you know, you haven’t slept very well…” No, actually I must have said this even in the, the night before. It wasn’t ‘cause he hadn’t slept well, but just because I knew that he’d probably get up in the middle of the night and then fall back asleep and then I would wake up in the morning and I’d be waiting for him anyway. So I was like, “I’ll get up in the morning. I will go to a charging place and I will charge it.” He said, “That’s cool. It’ll take like 20 minutes, don’t worry about it.”
So I go to one of the one charging places, one of two, and they have some kind of plastic cap that has been glued over the Chad Demo thing. There’s like four plugs that woulda worked if I had a Tesla or you know, some other kind of plug-in hybrid, but nothing for the Nissan and I was like, “Oh my God,” and I was so irritated because it was the Nissan website itself that had like sent me to the, the plug share website that kept track of all these things, so it was — I felt like Nissan itself told me that this was one of the places I could go and it clearly wasn’t up to date.
So the next place was like, a little further down the road, and so I went there, and thank God, it worked. So, basically one plug in the entire city that would charge my husband’s car. So I plugged it in. It ended up taking an hour, not 20 minutes, but that was okay. I just like did Pokémon, I mean, my husband was asleep so it’s not like I was going to do something else, and got it charged up.