A creek-side cabin in Gerroa

Bombala + Central Coast 2024

Beginning our Sydney to Melbourne return leg late yesterday, we only made it to Gerroa NSW for the night. We stayed in a nice cabin by the creek in the Discovery Park Gerroa.

Toast and cereal for brekky. We poured a thermos of tea for Tom and then set out in search of coffee for Francis.

We headed for Silos Estate, just south of Berry, since it has Tesla Superchargers and serves coffee. We are heading south, but Silos Estate is on the north heading side of the highway. The Tesla/Google navigation had us doing a loop on the overpass, but it turns out we could have just turned right into the estate.

Silos is on a beautiful outlook. We parked, plugged in and walked over to get coffee. But they don’t open until lunch time! 😫. Customers have been down since Covid, but they hope to expand hours again.

So, we hopped back in the car and drove off, using a U turn bay in the highway to head south again.

Charging

We haven’t charged since we left Erina yesterday. We included a message in our on-line booking at the park last night to ask if we could plug into a power point. We didn’t get a reply, and we arrived after the office had closed, so we didn’t connect.

We had hoped to charge while getting coffee at Silos Estate, but only connected for the four minutes it took us to find out that there was no coffee. Coffee takes priority over car fuel. PlugShare showed that the next south bound fast charger is in Batemans Bay, about 135km away. The Tesla navigation predicted we would arrive with 7% charge. “No worries”, I said. The guy next to us in the Cupra EV wasn’t so sure. I told him we had previously arrived in Batemans Bay with 4%, so this was fine.

Of course, we had lots of opportunities to charge so far, passing many fast chargers, including this one in Berry. But we prefer to only charge while parked for some other reason.

15 comments

  1. Is it safe to say that the cones mean there are only 3 chargers out of the 6 available?
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    1. Colin White looks that way. According to the Tesla app, 5 are available, but ABRP says all 6 are.

      Maybe the chargers are working, but being dirt / grass the ground it very soft. They don’t want cars getting bogged and tearing up the ground ?
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      1. Jason Munro There was a lot of talk a year or so ago of the owners of the property closing them off as they felt fit to preserve the grass.

        Apparently they installed geotext underneath to try and achieve that as well. I'm not sure how successful that was.
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      2. Colin White they are my closest supercharger, but I doubt I will ever actually need to use them. If I am going on a longer drive, leaving home at 100% I wouldn’t need to stop there. And the return would be less than 15 mins further south to home.

        So it’s handy for me they are so close, but ultimately unlikely I’ll ever need them.
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      3. Jason Munro I live about 30 minutes from them and have used them twice I think. More for curiosity than necessity.
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      4. Martin Harrington is your car the red M3H ?

        I may have spotted you. (I work on the JB road upgrade occasionally and saw a red M3H a few days ago headed to the hwy from JB road)
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    2. Colin White Good question. It does seem counter productive to block chargers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sake of grass worth hundreds. Surely a better surface would be a solution, Silos Estate?
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    3. Colin White no, it’s just Silos protecting the grass apparently. ( this is what they told me when I enquired).
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      1. Martin Harrington I suspected this may be the case 🙂

        "There was a lot of talk a year or so ago of the owners of the property closing them off as they felt fit to preserve the grass"
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    4. Colin White Was the same when we were there about 6 months ago
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  2. Batemans Bay
    2 NRMA fast chargers at Bay Pavilions.
    4 Chargefox fast chargers under Village Centre shopping mall.
    1 NRMA fast charger near McDonalds.

    Tesla coming in next 12 months to Batemans Bay. 4 Tesla Superchargers in Narooma with 4 Chargefox coming to Narooma in next 18 months.
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    1. Mathew Hatcher there is also a charger at Dan Murphys in the Bay.
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    2. Mathew Hatcher Hi 👋. Thanks. Yes, we have used all but one of those, on previous trips.
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  3. I just carry a charger and extension cable and plug into the kitchen or any internal power point if we have to .... As my darling wife says ,.there are more 3 pin power plugs around than petrol pumps ...
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    1. Peter Kelly Good advice. Yes, we have our own cables and could have done that, if we’d received the go ahead from the park reception.

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