Rick&Amy's adventures: May 14, 2023 Española to Ignace

We got an early start and we’re happy to leave the smell of pulp mill behind. Beautiful but cool morning for highway driving.

We have lots of electrons to get to Sault Saint Marie. We stopped at the PetroCan there and took 29 kWh.

Then we stopped in Wawa and took on a big charge, to give us some insurance in Marathon, 40.4 kWh.

One of the things we are learning on this trip is that the charging system in Canada is rudimentary with the exception of Quebec. The provincial government there is making the conversion to EV’s a priority as part of their carbon reduction program. There are chargers everywhere because of the grants and assistance the government has given to business and private individuals. Quebec Hydro has put rapid chargers everywhere. Not so much on the TransCanada highway, it is a patch work of chargers from different companies with little info coming from the companies on the state of their chargers. This was demonstrated today when we discovered both the Level 3 and Level 2 PetroCan chargers were down in Marathon ON. The PetroCan app says nothing about this issue. Another app, ChargeHub says the Level 2 is working, the PlugShare app does accurately tell you they are both down and in the comments PetroCan apologizes! Yet says nothing on their app. So we have taken to researching every leg of the journey closely so we have a plan B and C.

Today we put on kWh in Wawa so we had some hope of getting past Marathon if nothing was working here. We have 162 kms in the tank when we got to our hotel. Once we knew there was no hope of a PetroCan charge we got the car plugged into 110v at the hotel asap. (Hrs.x KWh=Kms, so the sooner you start on a slow level 1 charger the more you will have in the morning.) There is a Level 3 Ivy charge station at a restaurant in Terrace Bay, 82 kms down the road. We have never tried an Ivy station and our ChargeHub app says it can be used at an Ivy station, but it is an unknown. So we hope we can charge up there but if not, we want at least 220 kms in the tank so we have some room for error and enough range to get to Nipigon where there are supposed to be functioning Level 3 chargers.

So in spite of having to research and learn new apps we are still being tourist and stopping to see the sights. It has been 15 yrs since we have made this drive so most of it is all new again.