Return Day 3 - MB to ON

Left Brandon, headed for Thunder Bay. First stop on the west side of Winnipeg at a Flo to get us enough juice to get us through The Peg downtown (on Main Street, of Portage & Main) and the PetroCanada fast charger on the east side of Winnipeg where we topped up to 90%.
With lots of fuel, we headed off towards Ontario (Welcome to Ontario pic) – land of the subpar infrastructure…with Kenora in our sights, we targeted the PetroCanada fast charger we’d read about, but seen mixed posts…to be on the safe side, we called PetroCanada customer service 3x (they dropped our call 2x) before speaking to an agent for 10 minutes while she put us on hold and came back to report that yes indeed the PetroCan charger at 924 5th Street was operational and we wouldn’t have any problem. Spoiler alert … not only is there no charger at that location, there is no PetroCanada at that location! There used to be, but it was decommissioned in 2024. Luckily 15km or so down the road (luckily we weren’t running low), is Redden’s General Store in Kenora, which we’d stopped at on the way out – really tasty, greasy eats and the hugest gift store shopping maybe in all of the north?? So we filled up at the Ivy while grabbing a bite and doing a little browsing. The lesson here is always charge as much as you can when you're at a fast charger ‘cause you just never know what may lie ahead. Especially in northern Ontario….

In general, again we’re seeing we get better economy (24kwh/100km) in the mountains and in Ontario where speed limits are lower, and worse on the Prairies (30kwh/100km) where the posted speed is 110km/h so we’re doing more like 120km/h.

At the Marks Work Wearhouse/Canadian Tire in Dryden (Ivy) we walked Alfie down the road for a McDonald’s coffee before hopping back in for the last stretch to Thunder Bay…we’re just past Ignace at 5pm - the clock here is still an hour behind home. We have one more stop – likely the Uppsala Family Restaurant of pie slice fame on our way out – sadly it closes at 3pm, so energy but not in pie form. And then on another 200km to TBay for a late arrival – it’s say 8:40pm. We’ll see…

Thus far we’ve just been using the default reference consumption estimates in A Better Route Planner which we’ve found to be very conservative (better than the opposite!), but now that we’re getting a better feel for it, we’ve adjusted the setting and so far it seems to be pretty accurately predicting charge we’ll have remaining at our destination.