Good afternoon LordSiborg, I came to your neck of the woods yesterday, visited Halstead first stop from Scunthorpe 170miles, had a wee break at Cambridge services(A14) on the way down.
Anyway, obviously I needed to top the hungry battery.
I had quite a struggle to find any EV points in Halstead, so ended up in Braintree.
The Instavolt one I hoped to use was in a sports club carpark on the Braintree industrial estate, at the very end of a deadend, however upon finding said EV points, the slots where occupied by two petrol cars with no-one in sight.
That left me looking for something a little more likely to be available, the Tesco 7kWh PodPoint looked favourable, but finding it proved a little unsettling as the range was diminishing.
I eventually found it and after several attempts to get some charge out of it, we added 35miles range whilst we had a little snack we'd brought with us.
I realised we were in for a really long wait and the wife was getting very stressed, so pulled the plug and then made our way along the A120 to Birchanger Services.
I found two Gridserve chargers unoccupied, and proceeded to connect via the CCS plug, the screen display seemed confusing to me, not having used public EV charging many times, but it seemed to be progressing, so went into the services to refresh.
Having refreshed and feeling hungry, we attacked the KFC bar, only to find it was closing, and only had 10 Hotwings and a small fries available, together with a couple of Pepsi Max, and only costing £11.50, we were really pleased to get something reasonable for a change.
The really nice surprise was that when getting back to car, it had 93% and 233miles under its belt, so a couple of happy bunnies set off back to Scunthorpe.
This is not in anyway a downer on Braintree, if it had been in the daytime and knew the area better, I think things would have a lot smoother for my wife, she thought we were going to have sleep in the car, not ideal at all.
Anyway, I now feel much more confident at tackling longer journeys, hope I haven't bored too many of yous...