A few hundred kilometers from Toronto sits one of the worlds wine-making regions. The Niagara peninsula is a wonder well worth a visit. With that, and leaving he teenagers at home, we set out for some high-culture. We had a early evening theatre reservation, which left the better part of a Saturday to go explore and enjoy some slow travel.
The Niagara region is about 150 km from Toronto. For my 2018 Nissan Leaf, this means some charging is needed. I get about 200 km or so in summertime driving with some of it happening on 80 km/hr country roads. While its tempting to hit the fastest charger you can find, it is inefficient, given that you are likely to spend an hour or two at a winery sampling the goods (and of course using the “bucket” as I was trying to be a good hubby and let my wife fully enjoy the wine).
Lots of wineries offer L2 charging for their customers, the two I found, were Hidden Bench Estate winery, with two L2 chargers tapped into their solar system. The Henry of Pelham also had chargers, albeit in their employee lot. In both cases, we got permission from the staff to use the charger as it was available. In fact, we did all our charging on this trip using L2 chargers, letting the car make use of our winery time.
After enjoying the wineries, we made it into Niagara on the lake for a Shaw festival performance. We did stay the night, to return the next day, charging again at a hotel L2 charger. If you are headed to the Niagara region, its worth checking if your hotel has L2 charging, quite a few do nowadays. Despite driving well past my EPA range of 250 km, I never stopped to charge, true there happened to be a L2 charger where I stopped, but to tell you the truth, I was far more interested in the wine than the charging…
Electric car adventures 