It’s a great time for electric cars in Seattle right now-everyday it seems like we see more and more on the road and I even noticed a bus advertising AAA emergency roadside charging service for electric vehicles and they have a lot of resources on their website too. This type of thing makes road trips in an electric car very appealing and it’s amazing how many cool places you can comfortably road-trip to from Seattle on a long weekend. The Tesla Model S can drive about 200 miles without recharging and with an awesome supercharger network and proper planning it is fun to road trip by electric car. So when we were invited to Coeur D’Alene, we thought it would be a great place to try to drive to without using any gas.
One reason why Coeur d’Alene was a great choice for this trip is because I heard it was only about 4-5 hours from Seattle. It was surprisingly easy to go there in a Tesla with all the superchargers along the way.
We started out with a full-charge in Seattle. We had a few errands to run in Snoqualmie Pass (PS. it’s time to get your ski lessons booked in the case we DO have snow here this year!) but eventually ended up in Ellensburg where we found our first supercharger in a hotel parking lot. This charger is about 1/3 of the way to Coeur D’Alene and it’s a great bathroom stop too.
There were lots of food options nearby-I think every fast food outlet that we could dream of in Seattle is located here so this made a great stop for lunch. This Ellensburg supercharger is also the busiest one we’ve seen so far. On our way back to Seattle nearly ALL of the spots had cars charging-it was really neat to see so many electric cars!
Our next supercharger stop was in Ritzville which was in another hotel parking lot. There were also a few gas stations nearby but we weren’t really into exploring too much. We keep a football in the car and the parking lot was pretty empty so the guys could stretch their feet and throw the ball around.
We were lucky enough that our hotel, the Springhill Suites Coeur d’Alene had a charger so we actually never had to use the supercharger in Coeur d’Alene once we arrived.
Road-tripping with kids is such a neat way to travel because there are so many things you can immediately just stop, get out of the car and see. With an electric car you are forced to stop every so often to charge and I was worried that these stops would be too long, but the kids really appreciated this time to work of their energy and explore.
When we arrived at our final destination, we really enjoyed our time in Coeur d’Alene because there was SO much to see. Of course, the Silverwood Themepark was a huge hit with my kids. We also loved hanging out at City Park and McEuen Park and lounging on the beach too. There were some very cute coffee shops in town; we really liked Vault Coffee and at Calypsos Coffee we saw beans being roasted and a barista there gave us a brilliant list of things we HAD to see on our visit to Idaho. We even witnessed a fire at Tubbs Hill on our trip and we all held our breaths as we watched helicopters water-bombing out the flames from the world’s longest floating boardwalk at the Coeur d’Alene Resort where we ate dinner and followed it up with an infamous Gooey. (Apparently you are supposed to eat this with French Fries, but we did not have enough room left to try it out.)
Knowing how easy it is to get to Coeur d’Alene from Seattle by electric car we know we’ll be back again. This was an amazingly kid-friendly city and my kids can’t wait to re-visit.
(PS. thank you to Visit Idaho who helped with our itinerary, provided accommodation for part of our stay and connected us with Silverwood Theme Park too! I was not required to write anything and the opinions above are definitely my own.)
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)