Colorado Road Trip W/ Kids 2025- Day 1

Travel must be in our genes, because we like to road trip and camp as we go.  Summer of 2025 was no different, except we had a destination and a timeline to get there.  I had been invited to do a short but intense summer mini-internship with one of the world’s best donkey farriers…in Colorado.  So we knew we needed to get to Colorado and we knew when we needed to be there.  We also knew we wanted to do this road trip in our EV, but the Ford F-150 Lightning wasn’t giving us the mileage promised, so we traded it in for a Rivian R1S, which gave us every bit of the 410 miles we had paid for when we bought the Rivian with the upgraded battery pack.  So in late June of 2025, we headed out east…to get to Colorado.

The first day of the first roadtrip in the new vehicle was slightly nerve wracking, as I didn’t know how it would perform loaded with all of our stuff and camping gear (of course we wanted to camp as much as possible and had campground reservations in Colorado).  Our first destination on the trip was a shorter day, as we headed through the desert on I-40 to Kingman Arizona.  Kingman was our first destination as it seemed a good shorter drive for the first day, has a Rivian Adventure charging network station in place and we have relatives in Kingman that we visited while we were there, so it was a win-win all around.

In terms of road-tripping, some folks might not think about Kingman as a good place to stop, but we thought it had all the things we needed.  We found a great KOA to spend the night, good restaurants with decent prices and the next morning we spent just about 22 minutes at the Rivian Adventure Network Super-Charger to get to 90%….perfect for rolling down the I-40 as we continued East.  Day-2 would be a huge mileage day, as we ambitiously wanted to make it straight through from Kingman to Albuquerque…and stop along the way to check out a National Park.

So, here’s what our progress that first day looked like…less miles than most other days, but a good start to a great road trip, with kids.

I’m writing this road trip series about our summer of 2025 trip by EV from California to Colorado and back.  I specifically like to write about longer and more complex road trips (by EV & with kids) to allow you to read how we did it, so that perhaps we can take some of the range anxiety out of you and show you that longer road trips with kids are doable and won’t break the bank.  Unfortunately, the price of gas is going UP as I write this, so I also want to let you know that roadtripping in an EV isn’t that hard and was very practical for our family….could be for yours too.  I generally think of stops to charge the EV just like I think of stopping for gas and a quick pee.  Those stops take about the same amount of time and my family can’t sit in a road-tripping car all day anyways…so I don’t sweat the stops to recharge the EV.

Wanna primer for what my Saturday Road Trip Series will cover?  Click the link below and check it out:

LF2TS Travel In 2025- A Quick Year In Review