Planning a cross-country EV trip: charging reliability and backups

[CamilaJ]

I'm planning a cross-country road trip in my new electric vehicle next summer, and while the car's range is decent, I'm genuinely concerned about the reliability and availability of EV charging infrastructure, especially through more rural stretches of the Midwest. I've used the major apps to plan a tentative route, but I keep reading stories about chargers being out of service or long wait times, which adds a lot of anxiety to the trip planning. For experienced EV travelers, how do you practically manage long-distance trips with current charging networks? What backup plans or alternative routing strategies do you use when a planned charger is unavailable, and are there specific networks or charger types you've found to be significantly more reliable than others for minimizing downtime?