2021 SI Road Trip Day 7

The South Island loop concludes...

The group awoke at two locations today - Alan and Elizabeth in the north at Danseys Pass and Naseby and the remainder of us (Akira, Kaoru, Tomone, Yash, Brett, Sophie and Martin in Ranfurly.

Of course, I was awake early and at the Fast Charger before anyone else (inside joke!) charging from a dinner and a few test drives at a country pub the night before.  Actually, I should go into more detail about those:

We were at a recommend hotel for dinner at a little town called Waipiata (a few kms away from Ranfurly) - highly recommend and looks like every local from the district was there.  Many many many typical "farm vehicles" and I was admiring a young lad's trail bike (giving that we are moving next to a trail-bike track).  He expressed joy at seeing some EVs and, well, after the dance we took him and his family for a little tourque.  Needless to say, we now have a few local farmers who are very excited about EVs - one for the win!

Back to this morning - just as I reached near 80%, Brett announced that he was coming in on fumes, so I headed back to the camping ground to collect Sophie.

After grabbing breakfast, we picked up Yash and dropped him to Naseby for a "Dansey's Pass" experience homewards with Alan.  Brett, Sophie and I met up again and convoyed through Middlemarch and up the stunning Rock and Pillar Range.  First day of real rain.

Was amazing to see the size of the wind turbines at the Mahinerangi Wind Farm!

From there, we said our farewells and headed to the chargers in Dunedin and Mosgiel.  Found out that the chargers at Otago university have a P30 limit, so had to move out to Palmerston to get enough power to get back to Timaru.

It's been an amazing, if not somewhat unusual trip this year.  Shame not to have the Auckland lot be able to join us and as the Delta variant spreads further around the country, we do thank our lucky stars that we were able to complete the South Island loop at this time.

Night all,

Mr and Miss Exhausted!