Stopped for a few minutes at the Tesla Superchargers in Heatherbrae, while we decided…

…where to go next.

After leaving the Hunter Valley, we had just finished crawling along with the traffic along the New England Highway through Tarro and Hexham. For most of it, I just enabled Autopilot to let the car do the driving, while I had a cup of tea.

A couple of hours earlier, while parked for lunch at Cessnock Leagues Club, the car sent us a notification that I’d left the frunk open, when I’d retrieved my “emergency shoes” earlier. Francis volunteered to go back to the car to close it. I embraced my inner child by showing my mum and sister on the live camera on my phone, as Francis approached the car. Then I used the microphone in the Tesla app to broadcast “push it all the way” through the Robocop like voice of the car’s boombox. She texted back “You are a sick man” while the guy in the next car wondered what just happened.

It was late in the day, so we decided to just head for Bulahdelah for night.

Charging:

While we were getting our bearings in Heatherbrae, we plugged into the superchargers for a few minutes. We pulled into stall 1A, so as not to share power with the cars already parked in 2A and 3B. This is sometimes referred to as “urinal rules”, since you aim not to stand next to someone else. A few minutes later, some other cars arrived. One plugged in next to us in 1B, which reduced our charging rate from over 100kW to about 64kW. But we were just topping up, so it wasn’t an issue. The app told us that since the chargers had become busy, it would limit us to 80%. We upped it to 85%, since there were no other cars waiting.

We booked in on-line for two nights stay at River Myall Holiday Resort. We asked them about charging the car there, since there are no public chargers in town, according to PlugShare. We hadn’t yet received a reply, so we were topping up in Heatherbrae, just in case.