Day 2 - Northern Ontario

Alfie is ready to go!

Woohoo! Today's my (Alex's) 60th bday! Well, maybe more hoo than woo! ;) Started off great.... 8:00am in Sudbury at -13C with a 90% SOC. Free hotel breakfast at the Quality Inn (comfy bed, great shower but a bit run down) and then a quick stop at Starbucks. Next stop the 50KW charger at Tim Hortons in Blind River 162km away. Alex is driving and Geoff is working, Arrival SOC estimate 17% - we need to slow down to conserve energy, we averaged about 105km/hour - new target 90km/h. If headed to a 50 kW charger, it is better time-wise to drive slower and charge for shorter durations than to drive more quickly and need to sit and charge longer - lesson learned. Oops, forgot to record SOC on arrival at Timmy's, but we likely came in slightly higher than was estimated. We charged almost an hour (48kW) for $30. Coffee'd up and off we go!

Estimated 17% SOC for arrival in Sault Ste. Marie. Great stop at Trunk Road Petro Canada - cost us $25.65 for charge BUT right next door was a roadhouse we figured we'd have lunch - well, half of SSM was lunching there, because (happy birthday to me) it was $2.75 fully loaded burger day!! Actually a really decent, quick burger and sweet potato fries. Balanced out our charging cost ;) Now onto our tricky leg...

Headed to Wawa, with estimated 9% SOC on arrival - not a comfy margin in this neck of the woods. But we're doing so well so far, what could go wrong?! Drove ten minutes down a snowy alternate route🥂

(it was beautiful) to get to the Trans Canada, only to get on it to pass a big sign saying Hwy 17 closed from the Soo to Wawa - WHAT?!? It was snowy but that seemed ridiculous...dang, back to the Soo and trying to figure out Plan B (find a hotel, re-route the entire trip and stays....). To our great good fortune, it was only about an hour and a half before the highway was re-opened, so we topped back up - tried to charge at the GM dealership but were ICED out at their Level 2 (they actually would have moved the car) and their Level 3 was completely inaccessible as they hadn't bothered clearing it of snow! :( Found a Level 3 instead at the Water Tower Inn and set back out with just a little delay. Drive was absolutely fine (whiteout to sun in minutes) and we arrived Wawa 6pm - good news, our SOC on arrival had come up from the estimated 9% to 15% (phew!). And as has been the case the past several years, we arrived just in time for Wawa's Santa Claus parade - luckily we were able to do a quick charge here to 87% ($14.14) at the Petro Canada and not get caught in the parade ;) Still working our way towards Marathon...

Rolled into Marathon with 11% SOC, picked up Wok with Chow chinese for my bday dinner (too late now to celebrate at Drifter's) and headed to the Level 3 charger (200kW) at the Town Hall, only to find it was under maintenance!!

Oh my...our bad - this was the first stop that we hadn't remembered to check ahead that it was operational - Plugshare would have told us it was 0/1 or not available (it was a Petro Canada so when we called the number their hours were 8am-8pm (it was now 9:30pm). So, feeling a bit desperate, we pushed our button for Hyundai Roadside assistance, which dispatched CAA. Because of the poor driving conditions, their ETA was 2 hours plus. Good news, the closest charger they could tow us to was Drifter's Motel in Terrace Bay (where our bed was!). We had enough charge to keep us warm til they arrived - it was -13 out. We confirmed with CAA that they would actually be able to take us in the truck (including all 90 lbs of Alfie, our golden). So we settled in to enjoy our chinese takeout (bit too sweet), along with the little bottle of Veuve Cliquot I'd been given for my bday (quite the combo!) and thanked goodness for CAA.

While dining, Geoff looked over his shoulder and noticed (this is embarrassing) another charger right beside us - a Level 2! And it actually was working...now it would have taken about 7 hours for a full charge (and it was already 10pm or so).

So now we had a moral dilemma - we could wait another 1.5 hours for CAA or plug in and wait a few hours til we thought we had enough to get us to Terrace Bay on our own steam. We figured there might be others out in a storm that needed help more so we cancelled CAA, plugged in and settled in to sleep for a bit (the Ioniq actually is reasonably comfortable in this respect). We slept a few winks and by 12:15 or so had 40% charge; nerves said to wait til we were 43% at which point we thought that must be enough and we headed out. Bonus, it was a free charge! We left with estimated SOC on arrival of 7% (yikes) and every hill we headed up we held our breath to see if it would drop - as luck would have it, it sat at 7% for about 2/3 of the drive and then all of a sudden jumped to 14% (phew!) and we maintained that til we got to Drifter's Motel, about 1:30pm. They'd left our key outside for us, and we got hooked up to the Ivy Level 3 and very thankfully, went to bed. In retrospect, had we known the Marathon charger wasn't working, we might have charged to 100% in Wawa, and then driven at 80% to Marathon and charged for a bit less time on the Level 2.

How ironic, Geoff's fortune cookie!