The trip started shortly after 9:30 AM, when Patrick silently pulled up in front of the house in a white Tesla Model 3. The driveway of the house was being repaved due to some plumbing work that had been done in earlier in the year, so Patrick parked on the street. Todd & I both went to the car and took a quick look around it. The Model 3 is definitely a sleek-looking car! I had a small bag packed with my clothes, and a backpack, both of which fit easily into the trunk beside Patrick’s bags. It took me several attempts to get the passenger door open - the door handle requires you push in on the left hand side of the handle to pivot out the lever on the right; you then need to slip your fingers behind the lever to pull it out and open the door. I had watched a couple of videos on the Tesla website describing the way it worked, however I still found that I needed a bit of practice to get in. Once I managed to get the door open I said good-bye to Todd, and then we were off!
Patrick was behind the wheel for the first leg of the trip as we left Kitchener and drove east (north?) on the 401 towards Toronto. He had picked up the car earlier in the morning, however it was only about half charged so we were going to need to stop and “fill up” in fairly short order. The car has a single, tablet-sized screen in the middle of the console that acts as the navigation unit, the dashboard and the entertainment system all in one - there is not a separate instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. When we had departed from my house we had set Parry Sound as our destination, and as we were driving along the 401 the car determined that it was not going to be able to make it there without a charge, and displayed available Supercharger stations that we could stop at to recharge. There was one just off the 400 at the Vaughan Mills mall, and so we decided that would be a good place to take our first break.
We drove up to Toronto, opting not to take the 407 and instead take the 401 to the 400. We ran into a bit of traffic in Toronto; besides some slowdowns the drive to the Supercharger was uneventful, and luckily there were a few available charging ports at the Supercharger. Patrick backed the car into the parking spot, which was necessary due to the short length of the Supercharger power cable. Getting the car charging was very straightforward - the person we were renting the car from had a charging subscription with Tesla so all we had to do was plug the car in and then it began charging. With the car charging it was possible to see the estimated charge time - it was roughly 30 minutes, so we decided to pick up a coffee and stretch our legs in the mall while we waited. This was the first mall I had visited since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it felt a bit weird to be back in such a large building with so many other people. We ordered coffee from the Starbucks in the food court, and then walked through the mall. Vaughan Mills has a Bass Pro Shop, which we spent some time touring through. The store had a ‘fish of the Great Lakes’ aquarium - the fish of the Great Lakes are definitely not as pretty! After about 30 minutes we decided to head back to the car, and when we arrived we saw that we had more than enough range to reach Parry Sound. We unplugged the car, I got behind the wheel, and then we were off.
We continued on, driving north on the 400. I was behind the wheel for this leg of the trip, and this was my first time driving a Tesla. The regenerative braking kicks in as soon as the driver stops pressing the accelerator pedal, and this took some getting used to when navigating the parking lot. The car has a lot of pep to it - as we were merging onto the 400 from the on-ramp it was trivial to get the car to highway speed well before the merge was even required. We stayed on the 400 all the way to Parry Sound. Traffic was fairly light, so we made good time and arrived around 13:00. We pulled into the supercharger in front of the Parry Sound Inn & Suites, which was right beside the highway. There was an available charging point, and we left the car to charge while we had lunch. The closest place to eat was a McDonald’s a short walk from the supercharger, however there were no sidewalks, so we had to walk on the side of the road to get to lunch. This was the first restaurant I had eaten indoors at since the start of the pandemic. It was a day of firsts!
After a quick lunch at McDonald’s we walked back to the car. It had charged more than enough to allow us to reach Sudbury, so we unplugged and headed out. Patrick took the wheel for this stretch of the highway.
We drove without stopping until we reached our destination for the day, Sudbury. The landscape had been getting progressively rockier, and the trees had been getting progressively shorter, as we drove north. Once we left Parry Sound the highway stopped being divided, and we saw some fairly involved construction projects underway to bring the divided highway all the way up to Sudbury. The road continued on through some pretty substantial rock outcroppings that had been blasted through - it was impressive to think of the amount of effort that had gone into building this stretch of the TransCanada highway.
When we reached Sudbury we still had over 100 km of range in the battery, so we decided to go and do some sightseeing. We started by going to one of the better known Sudbury icons - the Big Nickel. The nickel is a replica of the 5 cent Canadian coin as it looked in 1951, and is the largest coin in the world. The Big Nickel is located on a hill that overlooks the city, and when we reached the parking lot we were able to look both across the city and at the coin. We milled around for a bit, took some photos, then got back into the car and continued on. There wasn’t really much to do besides look at the coin - the museum located at the site was closed on Wednesdays.
The next place in Sudbury that we visited was the site of Canada’s largest mural. The city had a graffiti artist, known as RISK, decorate the 80,000 square feet exterior of the old Sudbury hospital in 2019. The resulting multi-colour display is the largest mural in Canada. After parking we took some photos of the hospital, and then walked along the Bell Park boardwalk towards Science North and took in the sights of Hermit’s Bay. We returned to the car around 17:00 and drove downtown.
We found street parking just off Durham Street, and then did a small walking tour around what seemed to be the lively part of the downtown. There were some interesting murals on the buildings off Durham Street, however we didn’t see much else. We ended up deciding to have dinner at a restaurant named Respect is Burning, where Patrick had a pizza and I had their carbonara. Overall we had a pretty good meal.
After dinner we returned to the car and drove to the Supercharging point in Sudbury, which was in a fairly inconvenient location on the outskirts of the city, near where we drove in. We plugged the car in and walked through the Wal-Mart that was across the street from it to kill time. We picked up some candies to snack on, and then returned to the car, where we played a couple of games on the centre console while charging continued. This ended up being our longest charge of the day, as we wanted to make sure we had as much range as possible ahead of our drive up to Cochrane tomorrow.
After about 40 minutes the car was full, and we drove around the city and past the Lake Laurential Conservation area to reach our hotel. On the second leg of the day Patrick had been looking for our hotel for the evening, and had booked us a room at the TownePlace Suites. We checked in, dropped our stuff off in the room, then walked over to the MIC Canadian Eater & Whisky Pub for a nightcap. We were able to get space on the porch outside, however it was fairly chilly and we only had one drink before we returned to the room and headed to sleep.
