The final stopover on the Grand Tour

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Tonight we are staying in Saint Quentin, before returning to the UK tomorrow. Now that we are experienced at playing “chercher le borne” we know that on the A26 northbound from here to Calais there are no decent chargers; they are all on the southbound carriageway! On our way here we stopped at Laon to visit its wonderful cathedral, and we saw that there was a 175kW Total EV charger in the town. If we charged to near 100% we could get from there to the IONITY chargers at Folkestone (off junction 11 of the M20) near the channel tunnel without needing to recharge. We arrived at Laon with about 34%.


Unfortunately this charger only managed to give us about 75kW, even though it claimed to be 175! Since it was getting late in the afternoon, we decided to take a slightly longer route to Calais and stop at the Baie de Somme IONITY chargers on the A16. So we cut and ran with enough charge to get to St Quentin and then on to the Baie de Somme for a quick charge to get us to Folkestone. The lesson learned is that the chargers don’t always deliver what they promise!

The Total EV charger cost just under 50 cents per kWh using the Shell Recharge card. Interestingly, after all these charging sessions at IONITY, still none have come through to our bank accounts

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