The sun starts to dip on the horizon as I force myself to keep my eyes on the road meandering through rural upstate New York instead of checking the number growing ever smaller on my dashboard.

I have always been a nervous driver. I was not the kid that rushed to get their license on their Sweet 16. Instead, I was content to have others drive me, even taking the uncool bus to school and extra-curriculars for most of high school. Those were the days before smartphones, and I hated attempting to find my way to different places. The traffic on the highway intimidated me, and the possibility of a flat tire or some other car issue made me antsy.

Eventually, though, I overcame most of that anxiety. Smartphones helped. Yet since buying an all-electric car in October 2021, my concern over driving has returned. Rather than worry about getting lost or even a flat, now I superstitiously check the number displayed in a Can't Miss Size on the dashboard that says how many miles I can travel.

Road trips are synonymous with summer, and this one to a friend's cabin on a river in New York seemed an ideal way to say goodbye to the season. In many ways, electric vehicles are made for road trips. Depending on how far you're traveling, they require you to stop and charge them, meaning you have to build in a pause, hopefully, for some exploration or good food along the trip. Yet, fast chargers are seldom where you want them to be. At least not yet.

In late August, the state of California announced that it would effectively ban the sale of gas-powered cars (which my daughter refers to as loud cars) by 2035. While it's not a silver bullet, it's a step in the right direction to reduce overall carbon emissions. A win those of us concerned about our planet's future should celebrate, even if it's not without challenges. Right now, one of the biggest issues with electric vehicles is the lack of charging infrastructure.

This was only the second time I took a drive requiring me to stop and charge the car at some point along the way. The other time by myself was easy enough. Oh, I was still anxious—what if the chargers are not where the map says they are? What if it takes longer to get there than I thought? What if the chargers aren't working? Even in California, which has more electric car owners than any other state, drivers frequently end up at charging stations that aren't working.

In California, I am not. There are even fewer charging stations available in New England and rural New York in the first place. But I was driving solo on my first trip. This time with my 3-year-old buckled into her car seat in the back, not only did I need to find a place to charge the car for 30 minutes to an hour, but that place also needed to be able to entertain a preschooler.

A toddler when COVID first hit and unvaccinated for most of the pandemic, she really hasn't been in stores or restaurants or around lots of strangers for the majority of her life. And let's just say it's been a struggle teaching her how to act indoors around strangers.

On both trips, I used PlugShare — a user-generated map of public chargers, to plan out where to stop. Most fast-charging stations are found in highly populated areas, and on both trips, I ended up stopping at Walmart Supercenters, which so far have seemed to have the most reliable chargers. There's something not quite right, though, about wandering the aisles of a big box store full of things most of us don't need and that are only hastening the destruction of our planet while charging my electric car in the hopes of saving what I can for future generations.

When we finally pulled onto the rural road that led to our friend's cabin, greeted by the sight of fields of wildflowers on both sides, I said a silent wish that by the time my child is old enough to drive, gas stations don't exist, and fast charging stations are everywhere, near fields of wildflowers where we can make the most of charging delays.

Bridget Shirvell is a freelancer who lives in Mystic. This was first published in her Parenting in the Climate Crisis newsletter.