First Blizzard of the Year

I am back after several weeks on the road including putting 6200 miles on the Tahoe. The trip included travel to the Detroit area then over to Quebec City, Quebec for an IEEE electrical insulation research conference and the IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (IEEE-DEIS) AdCom and standards groups meetings. I serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE-DEIS website, presently under construction.

During the 13 hour drive back from Quebec City to Detroit on Tuesday, October 28, 2008, a snow storm started just outside of Montreal and worsened as I approached south of Ottawa. At that point, at 9:30pm, traffic on the highway was brought to a stop because of a major accident. The Tahoe, which handled exceptionally on the unclear highway, became an even better deal. As we were stuck there for close to 3.5 hours, the other vehicles around me shut down in order to conserve fuel and the passengers bundled up. As all of the systems in the hybrid are run electrically, I was able to keep everything on, put a DVD in the DVD player while spending a little time with my laptop plugged into the 120 volt outlet, all while I was relaxed and comfortable in my short sleeved shirt. The engine would occassionally come on to recharge the battery. The total fuel consumption was about a gallon with only the loss of 23 miles of average range (combined local and highway mileage) per the fuel range guage. The ability to spread out was also very nice.

I ended up finding a hotel and stopped for a few hours of sleep.

To be continued....