I was planning to do just the Santa Monica parade, but at 91040's suggestion I decided to go for the "grand tour:" Claremont -> Santa Monica -> Orange -> home. 135 miles in one day. Great to see mwalsh, Boomer23, and all the rest.
Malloryk, sorry you could not make the Santa Monica parade. I bet "Ruby" was disappointed she didn't get a chance to participate.
I got 10 minutes on the trailer-mounted QC in Santa Monica before the parade, but this only gave me a disappointing 20% charge. I will post pictures. All printed instructions were in Japanese. After the parade the line for more QC was 80+ minutes long, so I bailed. Learned from mwalsh that diesel-powered QC works out to about 50 miles/galleon, not bad at all. The exhaust heat from the charger was very modest, indicating high efficiency. The operator did report that in warmer weather (I estimate it was about 68F) the exhaust works a lot harder.
Thanks to Kataphn for making very thoughtful arrangements for charging at their place if necessary on the way home. I ended up going to the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City and having a great brunch at the French-style bistro while I got 1 hour charge at the Clipper Creek station.
After the drive to Orange I needed more charge for the 27 miles and 1Kft gain back to Claremont. The car GPS took me to Stadium Nissan nearby. Someone from the parade had beat me to their one charge station out front, but the Sales Manager was very nice and took me back to their service bay to plug in there. 1:40 of charge got me home with 24% charge remaining, most of one red bar.
This has probably already been posted, but I just wanted to offer my personal congratulations to Garygid for making the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/a...enough-alone.html?scp=1&sq=nissan hack&st=cse
