In the morning we decided to drive to a parking close to city center and walk around before leaving for York. Long story short: parking in Oxford is not a pleasant experience - busy, expensive and lot of unclear rules. Anyway, we walked to the center and had a nice guided tour in the Bodleian Library and the New College (don't be fooled by the name, the New College is one of the oldest and was founded in 1379). The guide was himself an Oxford alumnus and entertained us with various trivia: did you know that the only two studies you cannot do in Oxford are dentistry and veterinary science? And since New College was used for filming some Harry Potter movies, he also quizzed the group on knowledge of the characters and scenes. After the tour we had a super-delicious lunch at Turl Street Kitchen: the place comes highly recommended. Last but not least, we couldn't resist the temptation and dove into the Blackwell's Book Shop on Broad Street, especially its basement department - the Norrington room.
At about 15:30 (40 minutes late for parking, fortunately we got away with it) we left Oxford. We had 73% (about 325 km) charge and stopped for 10 minutes at Warwick SuC to answer nature's call and top up. A tesla employee was repairing a stall - someone had backed up into it.
Continuing our route we got into some traffic around Birmingham which cost us about 45 minutes. After Birmingham we took the M6 Toll North which was clear of traffic.
Tip: use the UK Supercharger Guide if you are preparing your Tesla trip through the UK. Some of the chargers are officially accessible in one direction only, the site lists some 'work-arounds' which may be unsupported by Tesla but still work.
The Stoke-on-Trent SuC is officially only available in the southbound direction. We decided to skip it because we figured we would have enough to reach Barnsley - the route through the scenic Peak District would not use much energy as the winding roads wouldn't permit us to drive more than 60 km/h on average. So we couldn't test the work-around: hopefully we will do so on the way back from Scotland.
The Peak District was a breathtaking experience: first and foremost, because of its beauty (see photos) but also because Katja - in the passenger seat - had to endure closely passing vehicles on narrow roads. We stopped in Buxton to see if there was a charger available and caught a glimpse of a beautiful opera house but we decided to move on because we wanted to see the whole Peak District before dark.
SuC Barnsley
We reached Barnsley SuC with 6% charge. This is a small 2-stall SuC near a nice-looking hotel. The food they serve is, unfortunately, not on par with the looks.
After another hour of driving we arrived in York around 0:30 which brings our total trip time to 9 hours. We stopped for about 2 hours in total, which gives us a net driving time of 7 hours, or 6:15 without traffic delays. Google maps predicted 5:46 which is still a bit optimistic. Lesson learned: the estimated time should be corrected by about 50% which we should do from now on.
The good news is that tomorrow we have a day in York - we can sleep in!
