A cup of novelty

I know it’s summer and most of us are on vacation or about to start it. In this article, I would like to talk to you about the experiment me and my husband did by choosing to travel in Europe with an electric car. I hope that some of my tips might help you if one day you’ll decide to do the same experiment. I wish I had known everything there is to know from the beginning.

Well, where should I begin? A few months ago we decided that it would be more profitable and better for the environment if we replaced the car we had, which ran on fossil fuel, with an electric car and that’s precisely what we did. We bought this Tesla model 3 that we liked and meets all the criteria we asked for.
Without going into too many details, I wanted to get to the moment when the vacation started in a few days and we were planning our route.

Since we now have an electric car that we will have to drive on our vacation through Europe, it would be advisable to look for where we can find charging stations, if they are on our route or nearby, in the countries we are visiting, and what is the quality of the road. All is good so far. The surprises come only when you leave for the road.
P.S. You need all the calm in the world if you want to go on such an adventure.

The morning our journey began, with Romania as the final destination, we left home with 89% battery to charge in Helsinki. The one in Helsinki for various reasons did not work, so in order not to miss the ferry, we decided to go and load the further in Tallinn, Estonia. Well, in Tallinn, a race against time has begun to find a charging station that does not ask for special cards, which only come by mail, and works just by downloading the app and paying online.

We lost 7 hours in total in Tallinn. We got off the ferry with 16% battery and in our crazy search, we were left with 0% battery. Remembering now, I seem to laugh at everything that happened; we laughed even then because we see the glass half full.
If you are doing a trip like this, what you can do in a situation like mine is to make sure your insurance covers you in all EU countries, and then you can contact them to send a platform to where you are and be transported to a station of functional loading in a relatively ok time.

After all this adventure in Estonia and after charging, I understood what the idea is of charging stations and what to expect. I have never had such a situation. We stayed in Riga on the first night, at Radisson Blu, Latvia, where we were welcomed very nicely and where we liked the most of all the places where we stayed on the way, but we will talk about hotels and our experience in the next article.

A bit strange for me it was in Poland where apparently you have to learn the speed limits and their rules in order not to collect any fines. You don’t really see the signs, so you don’t really know where you can go 90 km/h and where you can go 130 km/h. When it comes to supercharger stations, they are experts in putting them in the strangest places. Luckily, the car finds them by itself most of the time. Also, try to avoid, as much as possible, the city of Warsaw. It’s very crowded and the traffic is insane.

The roads were ok, all the way to Romania, and the expenses for charging the car were less than half the amount we should have paid for fossil fuel. I think this experiment was worth doing. I reduced many costs that would have arisen and I had the guarantee that the vacation would not be a total failure.
In all this madness with plane tickets canceled or indefinitely postponed, coming with an electric car was the best option. We should have rented a car anyway, for internal transport in Romania, so we saved the expense of the rented car for 3 weeks. Charging is almost nothing.

That’s about it about the roller coasters on the road, what you need to know, and certainly, in other destinations, we will check each station if it is operating or not, and backup options. I wish you a relaxing, beautiful weekend and see you next time with a new holiday article.

DEEA SKYE