After brief meetups with some family on the NSW Central Coast, we returned Mum home to…

…Cessnock. After a cuppa and a couple of odd jobs we said goodbye. The three of us had a blast on our EV road trip from Cessnock NSW to Emerald Victoria and back again.

Finally, we drove east to Newcastle, to stay at 291 on King. It’s a bit fancy but welcoming. I walked down the road to grab takeaway dinner from Bella Italia.

Charging:

The hotel installed destination chargers just a couple of weeks ago. I applaud their initiative.

I was surprised that these destination chargers require your own CCS “Type 2” cable. This might be the first time I’ve actually needed to use our cable. I’ve used it many times before, but not out of necessity. I imagine that most travelers who would book here would be unlikely to have their own cable. Reception does have one spare cable to loan to those who don’t have one, in exchange for a security deposit. With either your own cable or one borrowed from the hotel, it just seems unnecessarily fiddly.

The chargers require downloading and connecting using the Charge Hub app. This was a convoluted process, probably requiring over a hundred taps on the iPhone to locate and download the app, add payment details, locate the charger etc. The actual app is fairly good, but getting to the point of using it took ages. It also required connecting to my Tesla account, which I’ve not previously seen in a charging app. I couldn’t figure out why, but am interested to see if that somehow gives it better info on the car.

I wonder if it would have been far simpler for the hotel/parking owners to just install Tesla wall chargers, like they have in our previous accommodation at Best Western Plus Goulburn. Built in cable. No need for an app. Takes the customer five seconds rather than ten minutes.
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The parking fee was $35, which is probably typical for city parking. The cost to charge our car from about 15% to 100% (adding about 360km range) was $20.40.