January 2024 – blog.nya.nz

Shaking like a Leaf (I): From dawn till dusk

This blog post is part of a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Day 1: Brisbane to Newcastle via Pacific Highway

The first day involved travelling from Brisbane to Newcastle, which is around 780km. This was going to be longest I would be driving in a single day – partly because I had planned the road trip a little late and needed to fit around some schedules to catch up with people along the way. I probably would have stopped to stay in places like Coffs Harbour along the way if I hadn’t stuffed up the timing of the initial part of the trip.

A screenshot of the A Better Route Planner app, with a route marked between Brisbane and Newcastle, with multiple pins indicating locations for electric vehicle charging. — ABRP in action.

For general planning I used the “A Better Route Planner” app (ABRP) which suggested that it would take around 12 hours or so all up to cover the distance with some of the stopovers included. This app automatically routes travel to include charging stations, adds charge time to the total trip time, and you can even customise things like the remaining level of charge you want when arriving, and so on. I’ll pop comments about ABRP throughout this series, but overall I have found it pretty good and mostly lined up with my manual planning before I discovered the app, though its UI has quite a few quirks which can be frustrating at times.

For this leg I gave myself another 2 hours above the estimate, and planned for 14 hours in total with around 9 hours on the road. That would mean I would start at 3am AEST and arrive around 6pm AEDT.¹ An early start, but not something I haven’t done before in previous travels.

Shaking like a Leaf: the EV road trip from hell?

This blog post is the first in a series about my road trip around South/East Australia in an electric vehicle. Read other posts using the same tag.

Not many people know that I had acquired a Nissan Leaf as a second-hand Japanese import into Australia during COVID. It’s a battery electric vehicle, that until 2020 was the most popular consumer electric car in the world, and I decided to make it my first car after years of solely using public transport in various cities and needing a little bit more flexibility.

Getting back into blogging

The last post on this blog was from 2016, and much has happened since then.

Start of my professional career. Three employers. Four trips to Japan. Getting my own place. A global pandemic. Brewing my own sake. My first car. Australian Citizenship¹.

I’ve had multiple attempts at keeping a blog up consistently – it hasn’t stuck and frankly I’ve drifted away from an online presence over the past decade… I don’t even have an account on Instagram or TikTok, and while I still have my Facebook and Twitter/X accounts, they’re effectively in hibernation.

I used to do random posts regularly as a student, blogging through a platform that originally was just a forum, called Geekzone (seems like they wound down that feature now) and tweeting regularly on Twitter. This was back when I had heaps of energy and almost singlehandedly maintained an open resource that listed out providers and prices of internet products like dial-up (!) and ADSL broadband back in New Zealand. Some even wanted it properly funded. Gosh, that takes me back.

Back to the present – I have been “maintaining” this blog in the sense of keeping the software up to date and moving it when hosting has changed a couple of times, but there hasn’t been any real activity on this blog (or as a matter of fact, nya.nz generally) for a long time.

I don’t have any plans as yet to how I’ll fully reboot this blog, but this post is a note to myself as part of 2024 new year’s resolutions to do more random stuff, more often. I’ve lost a bit of the maker/tinkerer side over the years, and I wanted to get back into that. Keeping a blog up for that hopefully will motivate me to do just that.

Here’s to 2024!

Almost! I’ve been approved but not formally granted it until I attend a Citizenship Ceremony, which I have been recently notified the date of. ↩︎