After leaving Joplin, I took the Focus Electric alone through most of the night on the way to Tulsa. My first stop was a bucolic RV park in northwest Oklahoma. Part of the problem with trips like this is that you drive into some areas in the middle of the night looking for a charge, and may have a tough time understanding where you truly are. As I walked around the quiet park just after midnight, it slowly dawned on me that there was a body of water nearby. Then I saw some powerboats bobbing gently on a pier. Okay, it's not just a little pond. I pulled out my iPhone and realized I was near Grand Lake O' the Cherokees, one of those intensely splintered, contorted, serpentine lakes that looks a bit like a Chinese dragon from the air.
Alas, this time I was a ship in the night, and when VOLTemort finished drinking up her share of voltage from the RV plug, I packed up the charging station and headed for Tulsa, about 65 miles distant. I may never know the Grand Lake's beauty first hand, but I'm sure it's lovely.
I arrived in Tulsa after a drive that turned out to be mostly down the highway. If you enter your destination on the Focus's EV-specific navigation and vehicle-management system, and tell it that you'll be charging at your destination, it will choose your route to stretch out your range if necessary. The car evidently decided that a bit of highway driving was okay in this case, and that's fine—it was dark and I was getting tired. I reached the Tulsa Expo, our next charge point, where Coleman and I switched for an early morning stint. He carried the car on toward Oklahoma City while I gathered up Martin, Nicole, and Wes and ran chase.
Clean the gills of the mushrooms from the bottom of the caps and roughly chop the mushrooms, onion, and garlic. Add the mushrooms and garlic to a non-stick pan at medium high heat. No oil needed—the mushrooms and onions will release their inner moisture, and you save about 240 calories. Once they start to stick to the pan, deglaze with a small amount of tamari and add the garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent. Drain any moisture remaining in the pan and transfer the mushroom mixture to a food processor. Pulse two to three times, leaving a few chunkier pieces. Add bison and mushroom mixture to a bowl and mix well with your hands. Shape into six burgers. Heat the grill to high heat. Carefully add the burgers to the grill, they will be susceptible to crumbling at first. Cook 3-5 minutes per side, or until desired degree of doneness.
Her key advice on grilling: If the burger sticks to the grill, it's not ready to turn. The searing process will eventually release the meat from the metal, and you'll be able to flip it then.
Keri then showed how to grill catfish, another local favorite. The trick here is using aluminum foil, which prevents the catfish from crumbling through the grates and also allows the moisture to heat up and help steam the fish to tender completion. Your plan: Lay out aluminum foil sheets and place slices of lemon on the foil. Then then lay catfish fillets on top of the lemon slices. During cooking, the lemon aroma will be drawn up into the fish. Season with lemon pepper seasoning mix and fold the aluminum around the catfish to make flat foil packets with sealed edges. Place on the grill over medium high heat. Cook 10-12 minutes. Resist opening the foil for the first ten minutes to keep the steam in the foil pack.
Finally, she showed us how to make barbecue chicken kebabs. First, you soak wood skewers for several hours. Chop boneless, skinless chicken breast into even pieces, and then chop veggies into even pieces (bell peppers, onions, zuchinni, and yellow squash are all good options). Alternate chicken and veggies on the skewer. Place skewers on the grill over medium high heat, and rotate them as the chicken cooks. Add barbecue sauce with a brush during the last 5-10 minutes of cooking.
The food was, of course, delicious. They grilled right out by our charging car—Whole Foods has the only public charging station in town—and we had plenty of people come by to check out the car and grab a bite to eat. Reactions to the Focus during the drive have run the gamut. Some are skeptical of the technology, some guys don't think that electric cars are manly enough—though I'm inclined to disagree, given the Focus Electric's 200 lb-ft of instantly available torque—and some are a bit cynical of motivations behind the technology, feeling it's fueled, so to speak, by politics on the manufacturer or governmental side. But without exception, everywhere we've gone the response to the EV and our project in general has been predominantly enthusiastic and excited. Is the electric car for everyone? Of course not, but there are plenty of driveways that will eagerly welcome it.
In Oklahoma City, we bid temporary farewell to Coleman Ruiz, who had to go to Dallas for a few days to speak to several groups about his work at Carry the Load, fortunately, we traded our Navy SEAL for a new team member, Kate Cwynar, a nursing student from Dallas who also works with Carry the Load. She came up to jump onto the Challenge and try her hand at EV driving. When we left Oklahoma City, Martin and I took the Focus, with him at the wheel. As an endurace racer, he's fascinated by the challenge of stretching your range, regardless of whether your ride is powered gasoline or electricity. He relished the prospect of stitching together our remaining stops, something that's going to be increasingly hard to do as we cross the desert Southwest.
So we left Oklahoma City and spent the evening and night crossing over to Amarillo. We stopped first at a campground 65 miles west of OKC. When we pulled in we found, to our shock, one of the coolest "playgrounds" we'd ever seen—an enormous air pillow that you can bounce endlessly on, and a series of outdoor fitness machines that simulate gym machines--ellipticals, leg presses, etc.—but rely entirely on your own bodyweight. All of this ... in Oklahoma! We bounced on the big pillow that caught a quick workout on the machines. Totally reinvigorated, we continued our westward march.
After dark we pulled into a town in western Oklahoma called Clinton, and spent some time hanging out at a bar called Blackjack's Pub while our car charged up again. Then Wes took the wheel this time as Martin, Nicole, Kate and I went ahead to our Hampton Inn in Amarillo. Again, racing down the highway, we all felt we were missing out on something by not helping plug the car along overnight. But we needed our sleep, so we did the right thing.
The next morning, Wes arrived in Amarillo and we rewarded him for his dedication with, of course, a steak lunch. And not just any steak lunch—a 72-ounce monster at world-famous steak house The Big Texan. Owner Bobby Lee met us—along with several television stations who heard we would be ripping through town with our electric whip—and offered to set us up with their classic over-eating challenge, the epic 72-ouncer. If you can down this $65 monster, along with all the sides, within one hour, it's yours free. The record is an absolutely horrifying 8 minutes. We agreed to a contest: Wes Connor, our Georgia good ol' boy, going up against Martin Plowman, the lean British athlete. This ain't exactly a Men's Health kind of experience, but what can you do? My hands were tied.
Wes and Plowey got up on the stage, shook hands, and sat down to gorge as the other diners cheered them on. The slowly began trimming off bites and downing them, pecking away at the potato and fried shrimp sides, as well. But mostly, it was all about the steak. The digital clock above their heads ticked down.
"Hey y'all what part of the cow is this steak from," Wes shouted at one point.
"All of it!" the waitress shouted back.
After 30 minutes of eating, Martin—who averages 5 percent body fat—started sweating, and Wes couldn't maintain eye contact anymore. Neither felt like talking, and they both put sunglasses on.
We loaded out cross, sweaty heroes into our increasingly cluttered and dusty pickup and went over to grab our car. Next stop: a hot, dusty RV park 60 miles down the road, near the New Mexico border. The only action in site was a restaurant called Roosters—though none of us were really hungry at that point. So we cracked out a kite. Not just any kite, but a stunt kite you can do loops and spins with by steering via the dual lines. None of the team members had any experience with such a thing, and with three hours to fill in this stop, they were eager to take a crack at it.
Flying a stunt kite is a challenge. The faster the wind blows, the faster the kite rips around. If you're not careful it can slam headfirst into the ground, or spin around out of control and twist the lines up. But each team member took their turns with it. Martin, who digs any technical challenge, mastered it quickly and was zooming the kite around the sky as though he was steering it through a chicane at Le Mans. Kate took her turn and grabbed on to the handles like they were the proverbial horns of the bull. She, too, sailed the kite through the sky, swinging it low along the ground and rocketing straight up to the zenith. She pivoted around as the kite followed the wind. "I didn't know if I'd be able to control this thing," she said. "So it was really cool to be able to just keep it going and steer it all over the sky."
Nicole took her turn and spun the kite around the deep blue sky above us. As our car topped off, it was time to real it in. "Flying that thing was awesome," she said afterwards. "I mean, who does that? My brain was so focused on doing this that I had no sense of time any more. It was new and fun."
That's the idea here—fill our charging stops with the activities that surprise and engage us. Sure, that makes the charging stops sail past a bit faster, but even if you're driving your gas-burner on a cross-country journey, what would it hurt to pull over by the side of the road every now and then and just try flying a kite?