BRIAN REID PHOTOGRAPHER
France 2024 Day 15 Go North Young Man (Part 1)
Saturday, 20 April 2024 19:17
As noted, my trip came of the rails, yesterday, when the tummy bug did not settle down after a day resting in the hotel in Toulouse. It was clear that I had three options. First wait out another day in Toulouse, second head off in hope to the Atlantic Coast or third cut my losses and, assuming I felt up to it head north back to the channel. By late afternoon it was clear that the least worst option was the third one. By following the autoroutes you get an Aire (service station) every 40 to 50 kilometres allowing options for emergency stops along the way and easy access to Superchargers. I took a light breakfast this morning and walked over PLace Capitole to the carpark and picked up the car. I managed to make it to my first Supercharger stop at Montauban before making a human pit stop and that process followed up to Limoge, again successfully, and finally here to Poitiers, just! As it happens the first part of the journey was like a reverse timelapse of my trip so far with most exits leading to places I have visited. This time in hours rather than days. As long as a solo driver in a right hand drive car has a toll tag, the péage sections are trouble free. You can easily tell if you are on a péage as those sections have much less traffic! I don’t know what the toll charges are yet as they have not appeared on my account. I took a picture of Place Capitole in Toulouse as an “I was there” while walking across from the hotel to the car park entrance. The hotel has an arrangement which knocks the parking charge down to €15.40 per night, which is half price, and for the location, priceless. As you can see it was a beautiful, but very chilly, morning and my hotel was on the right. It was a successful day and I am about to find out whether my dinner will be staying with me for a little while. I’ve included a photo of the Tesla screen after I started charging at Montauban which indicates it is adding over 1000km per hour. It does not stay at that speed as with increase battery fill the charge rate slowly tails of. I actually added 265 km in 26 minutes quite a bit more than I needed but I had other business in mind.
This is what the charging station was like and has 16 stalls which can be used by any EV.
I grabbed a couple of shots while on autopilot. In this one I am about to cross the Lot just east of Cahors.
A stop at Limoge (another 16 stalls) introduced me to a giant E Leclerc shopping centre with an extensive food court and pretty clean toilets
From Limoge it was off the autoroutes as the shortest and about the quickest road to Pointiers was a mixture of N and D roads and this brings moments like this. Chateau d’Aigne at Iteuil a few miles south of Poitiers. One of the reasons why I like to drive.