If you think trying to find an outlet for your laptop at the airport is a chore, wait until you have to find an outlet for your electric car at the hotel.

That's the quandary that faced us this evening as we rolled into Medford, Ore., our overnight stop on an 800-mile road trip in a Chevy Volt. Actually, our Volt was one of the four electric-plus-gasoline-powered cars making their way across the country as part of Chevrolet's "Volt Unplugged" tour. As the sun was about to set, we pulled into the TownePlace Suites' parking lot and headed into the hotel lobby.

Chevrolet Communications' Adam Denison asked the clerk at the desk where we should plug in the cars — and that's when the trouble began.

"I beg your pardon?" the clerk said. She hadn't heard anything about finding electrical outlets for four cars, and what's more, she didn't have any of our names on the registration list.

Actually, the clerk's quizzical reaction is probably what most electric-car drivers will face when they go on the road. To look into the issue of finding hotel plug-in power, I called around to seven Medford hotels in advance of this week's trip. The reactions ranged from "I'm sure there has to be an outlet somewhere" to "call back tomorrow" to the straightforward response I got from an establishment billed as Medford's finest hotel: "We do not have plug-ins available for hybrids."

Tonight, after working through the clerk's confusion, we found out that our reservations were actually at the TownePlace Suites' sister hotel across the parking lot, the SpringHill Suites. Both places are part of the Marriott hotel chain, one of the partners for the "Volt Unplugged" tour, so the SpringHill folks knew we were coming and had a sheet of instructions ready for us, listing the locations of electrical outlets on the building's exterior.

Simple, right? Wrong.

Looking for the outlets turned into a cross between an Easter egg hunt and a peeping-tom convention. We skulked around the perimeter of the hotel in the darkening twilight, walking through the bushes and under windows in search of places to plug in.

"If we can't plug in, we can't plug in," Denison said with a shrug.

I finally found one of the outlets near the disabled-parking places, and the other near the hotel dumpster. We decided it wouldn't be right to park our shiny new Volt in the disabled zone, so instead, the hotel let us park it right next to the front entrance. We laid out some red traffic cones, plugged in the Volt's specially designed 120-volt charging set and strapped the extension it down to the sidewalk with duct tape.

Two more outlets were found at the TownePlace, with the help of the SpringHill Suites' instructions and the TownePlace's maintenance crew. In the process, I found out that the Volt's charging cord set works best if it's the only thing plugged into an outlet, even if it's a double-socket outlet. If you try sharing an outlet with another device in the other socket, you have to cut back on the amps for charging, or risk blowing a circuit.

That's not all: The Chevy crew wanted the hotel to turn off the automatic sprinkler system for the night, just to make sure that an inconveniently placed cord set didn't get soaked. I just hope the expensive-looking set is still there in the morning when the 9- to 10-hour charging process is complete.

We spent the better part of an hour making the arrangements to plug in four cars, which made me wonder how hotels will handle the plug-in issue when there are thousands of electric cars on the road. If you're visiting your Aunt Rita, she'll probably let you run an extension cord out to your car from the front porch. But if you're staying overnight at a hotel, you might have to fight your way to an outlet — or just continue to fill 'er up at the gas station down the street. And even if the hotels are accommodating now, will they be so willing to give electricity away when 40 drivers are clamoring for overnight juice?

Am I making a mountain out of a 120-volt molehill? Or is this an electric-car complication that hasn't yet been thought completely through? Feel free to discuss this or other unintended consequences of the shift to electric vehicles in the comment section below.

Overnight mileage update: We went 490 miles today, with a gasoline top-off in Portland. 11.8 gallons of gasoline were burned, which translates to 41.5 miles per gallon. (The 32.9 miles of all-electric driving counts as a bonus in these calculations. If you subtract out those miles, that brings the mileage rating down to 38.7 miles per gallon.) If you assume that the Volt's gas tank holds 8.5 gallons, that means the car could have gone 350 miles or so without a fill-up or recharge ... which matches the range estimate that Chevrolet came up with.

Update for 10:25 a.m. ET Oct. 12: All the cars are charged up and ready to go for the second and final day of our road trip, less than 12 hours after they were plugged in. (Sorry, I didn't go out in the middle of the night to see exactly when they completed charging.) The hotel didn't have to turn off their sprinkler system. Instead, the Chevy team wrapped the cord set in plastic, just to make sure no moisture got into its electronic innards. I did the same thing a year ago with the extension cords for our Christmas lights. I guess great minds think alike. ...

Follow msnbc.com's Alan Boyle and Jim Seida as they take an 800-mile "Electric Road Trip" in a Chevy Volt ... and file their dispatches from the road. Boyle is also tweeting about the trip as @b0yle on Twitter.

It's amazing how remarkable normal can be. The most common comment folks have about the Chevy Volt is how much driving it feels like driving an ordinary automobile. Sure, there are lots of cool graphics on the dashboard screens, but the handling is remarkably ... unremarkable.

Here's how Intel's Ed Wynne put it after he test-drove a Volt around the computer -chip company's campus in Hillsboro, Ore., as part of a stopover organized by the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association:

"It felt like an absolutely normal car," he told me. "I don't know whether that's good or bad. I feel like it's a good thing."

Wynne said he wasn't always certain whether the Volt's gas-powered engine was on or off. During the course of a low-speed drive, the engine tends to stop or start, based on how much load is put on the batteries. That pattern of driving cut into our gas mileage figures, with the result that our car registered an efficiency readout of 43.1 miles per gallon after 236 miles.

That's not bad, but it's not a record-setting performance either. Once you subtract out the 32.9 miles we drove without using a bit of gas, the figure comes out to roughly 40 mpg for the gas-powered engine. (Of course, that's not the official EPA rating ... your mileage may vary.) When I observed that some msnbc.com users were unimpressed with the gasoline fuel-economy numbers, Tim Perzanowski, a senior project engineer at General Motors, said the fuel-saving challenge calls for different strategies, suited to different driving styles.

"There's no silver bullet for our energy needs," he said. The real benefit of the Volt comes into play if you usually drive 40 miles or less in the course of a day, but take on the occasional long-distance ride ... like our two-day, 800-mile sojourn from Seattle to San Francisco, for example.

Perzanowski also explained that it takes a few engineering tricks to make an electric-drive vehicle like the Volt "feel" like an absolutely normal car. For example, the pushback you feel when you step on the brake? That's divorced from the actual mechanics of braking the car. It's engineered into the braking system to provide feedback for drivers as they press their foot on the pedal. Some reviewers have commented that the braking on the Volt can be firmer than they expected — but I suppose you get used to it.

Other embellishments:

• Engineers built in a little bit of forward "creep" if you have your foot off the brake and the accelerator while the car is in gear. There's no need to do that with an electric car, but drivers who are used to conventional cars expect to have that creep.
• As I mentioned last week, the Volt is programmed to shut down the gas engine when you come to a stop and begin moving again, in part to avoid confusing drivers who would worry about having the engine running while they're trying to stop. Even after the car switches from its all-electric, all-the-time mode, the engine will occasionally shut down, depending on how much the batteries have been charged up.
• A little green ball spins constantly on the right side of the dashboard display, indicating how eco-friendly your driving style is. Drive too aggressively, and the ball rises toward the top. Too timidly, and the ball falls. The ball is GM's version of the vines and leaves you see sprouting (or withering) on a Ford Fusion Hybrid's dashboard.
• The Volt has three modes of operation: normal, sport and mountain. "Sport" is for when you want more torque for a faster, more sports-car-like response. "Mountain" provides more oomph from the batteries as well as the generator when climbing a steeper grade. When you roll down the other side of the mountain pass, you can shift into low gear to increase your regenerative braking and build up the battery power.

Chevrolet added a couple of features to address the issue that the Volt can sometimes be too quiet. There's a stuttery little horn that you can activate by pushing the lever on the left side of the steering wheel, just to let pedestrians know you're coming. And when you turn the Volt on or off, it makes a simulated power-up or power-down sound — just to give drivers the illusion that this is "an absolutely normal car."

Follow msnbc.com's Alan Boyle and Jim Seida as they take an 800-mile "Electric Road Trip" in a Chevy Volt ... and file their dispatches from the road.