We didn't want to leave our beautiful house in Ireby - we finally left at 13:30. The first part of the route went through the beautiful Lake District (part of the Cumbria county whose name descends from Briton Cymru which, incidentally, is the Welsh name of Wales). It is gorgeous, but a word of warning: in high season it is very crowded. We even didn't have an opportunity to stop for pictures. We did stop at an organic farm shop / café Low Sizergh Barn - highly recommended for the quality of goods / food / gifts!
We continued our trip and had to chose whether to charge at Charnock Richard or Warrington. Charnock Richard is officially only accessible northbound (although the UK Supercharger Guide lists a work-around) and Warrington is even not open yet according to the Tesla's own site at the time of writing. We decided to do the first one because it had 12 stalls (6 free) and the latter one had only 2.
We arrived at Charnock Richard and found the SuC without issues by carefully following the guidelines. To our surprise, we found all stalls empty.
We charged enough to reach our destination - the Royal Sportsman Hotel in Porthmadog, which is listed as a Destination Charging location. When booking, I specifically asked to reserve a charging spot.
After some Motorway driving we reached Wales, and later Snowdonia National Park. Note: I always use Autopilot when driving on the Motorways, and my standard hand position is on the left "spoke" of the steering wheel. Most of the time that works fine, but sometimes (like 3 times until now) AP asks to hold the steering wheel and flashes the outline of the instrument panel with blue. Then I have to apply more force to the steering wheel and the message disappears. This is new behaviour to me. (Another note is that when I mention Snowdonia I always remember Suske & Wiske, but that's an inside joke for Dutch language speakers I guess).
Snowdonia is absolutely stunning - and also crowded, just like Lake District. Here we managed to stop and make some pictures. I even did a really touristy thing, paid £1.50 (actually £2, no change) to take a picture of the Swallow Falls - a nice waterfall, but not really worth the time for a detour and finding a parking spot. We arrived at our hotel around 20:00 and it was really good we had a parking spot reserved for us, since the hotel parking was full. I plugged the car in and it started charging with a disappointing 19km/h - since I have only a 'single charger' on board I can only charge with 16A instead of 32A, so effectively this is only half the speed a Tesla Wall Connector can deliver.
We finished the day with a meal at the hotel - we booked it along with the room. The restaurant was not bad, but Sirloin was overcooked and anyway, we were definitively spoilt after our Portree experience (see Fort William - Portree for details).
The availability info was incorrect - all 12 stalls were free when we arrived.
Charging with the Tesla Wall Connector
