Rick&Amy's adventures: May 16, 2023 Ignace to Winnipeg

Well we had a nice sleep in the Lone Pine Motel in Ignace. Nice place, very quaint but well done for a 1970s motel. There motel breakfast was very good simple wholesome, homemade food. We had charged up to 80% on the rapid charger yesterday evening so we had plugged in to the 110v at the motel for 12hrs over night. We were hoping to get a 100% charge by morning. It worked 100% charge with 405kms of range, enough to take us right through to Kenora. We are beginning to notice how sensitive the car is to temperature. In Mississippi Mills we charged the same way overnight and the car read 475kms in the morning. The temperature was 18ºC, this morning in Ignace it was 5ºC. So maybe we will have to park the car inside the heated shop in the winter?

We checked out the Ivy chargers in Dryden on the way by. They were both operational and there was a guy in a Ford Escape on one of the charges. He was doing what we were doing, except he started in Vancouver and was heading to London ON. We traded notes about what to expect down the road, what was working, what was not, where to stay and where to eat. He told us the Co-op chargers across the prairies were working and less expensive than PetroCan, which might be the most expensive chargers.

So today we had a nice easy drive. There is construction on a lot of the bridges, both in Ontario and Manitoba, but no big deal since the traffic was light. At no point did we have to drive on temporary gravel bypasses. We did some more site seeing and stopped at a vertically integrated farming operation. Egli’s Sheep farm and bought 2 pair of wool gloves. They had a large retail store on site along with farm tours and petting zoo for the full on tourist season. It was very nicely done.

One of the challengers with driving new cars with lots of onboard thingamadooeys is that most of it is cell phone dependant. While we were surprised how good the service was generally, there was also a lot of this!

When we got to Kenora we were back in familiar territory, if you don’t include charging stations. We located a rapid charger down on the water front which was a perfect place for our picnic lunch. Except it didn’t work. So we back tracked to a PetroCan charger at the A&W. Except it was occupied by some guy with an Audi EV. It was our former colleague and local resident Wybo. So we had a good chat about EV life and his experiences driving across northern Ontario. He has had to have his car towed twice, once because of a dead charging station and again from the same tow truck operator because when they hooked up the car the first time they wrecked the air ride suspension!

Wybo left and another couple pulled in with a Chevy Bolt. We were just finishing charging at the time. Some kind of serendipity was at work, they had owned their car for just 8 days, just like us. And just like us they were driving across the country to bring the car home. The only difference was they had picked up the car from their son on Vancouver Island and were driving to Newfoundland. Stories were shared again about EV road tripping in these early days.

We went back to the harbour for lunch and then we were on our way again with plenty of electrons to get us to Wpg.

Since this is going to be our last night, of the first part, of what we are now calling “The 50th Anniversary Tour”, we thought we would splurge on an Airbnb downtown condo. Nice view of the smoke haze from the 19th floor.

Then it was supper at the Forks. And they really know-how to treat an EV owner, prime parking and free electrons! These are the halcyon days of EV driving, soon everyone will want to park there.