On Friday last we decided to take a drive to Bundaberg and visit with relations for a couple of days. So we charged the car up to 100% on Thursday evening and left Friday at around 9am for the two hour trip. Apple Maps says it is a 142k drive but regardless of how many Ks it is, it took us two hours (with the cruise control set at 100) and we arrived at Sugarland Plaza with 57% of battery left.

We knew that Sugarland had charging points so we drove around the back to find them. There were two Tesla chargers and two Charge Point chargers. Seeing as we don’t have a Tesla and didn’t have a Charge Point app on our phones we had to give charging at Sugarland a miss, which was a bit of a pity because we had some shopping to do and the time on a charger would have been quite useful.

Strangely enough there are no fast DC chargers in Bundaberg itself. The only one within reasonable distance is at Burnett Heads, which actually suited us because we have relatives living in the area. All the others seemed to be AC chargers. The charge we had left was sufficient for us to drive around for what we wanted to do all weekend, mostly visiting relatives and then of course the required trip or two to Bunnings.

We stayed until Sunday morning and decided that a trip to Burnett Heads for breakfast and a charge at 8am was not unreasonable on a Sunday morning so that is what we did. Fortunately there was no one wanting the charger earlier that we did so we charged up to 89% while we broke our fast at the nearby cafe. The Burnett Heads charger was installed a couple of years ago when the local council did some work to modernise the local area. It has been free since then and is still free.

We left Kalkie at about 9.30am for our trip back to Gayndah, stopping in at Aldi on the way. On the way home I set the cruise control at 90kph to see if the lower speed would make much difference to the energy consumption. As mentioned above, on the way to Bundy I set it to 100kph. It didn’t make a lot of difference. We were loaded up with groceries for the trip home so the extra weight may have added to the energy consumption. I guess the biggest difference was the lines of traffic which gathered behind us and didn’t seem too happy to be travelling at 90k.

The required car wash

Of course when one arrives home from a trip, one needs to give the car a wash. Not sure how long this will last but at least for the first trip we decided to remove the bugs etc from the front of the car and the outside rear view mirrors. Our grand daughter was here for the afternoon so she volunteered to give us a hand.