Y'all check it out! Right now, I am in Austria.
And now,
I'm in Italy.
Italy.
Austria.
Italy. Austria. Now both!
Oh no!
Good morning everybody.
Hello there.
Eric and Allison coming at you once again for DW Travel.
Our electric campervan roadtrip is finally coming to an end.
We've arrived to our final charging station of the trip.
It went by so fast, too fast maybe.
As you guys saw, we had some troubles with charging the vehicle.
Stations not working, stations not being properly marked on the map, all kinds of stuff.
But we have found that we have the best luck with these Ionity chargers.
They have worked every time, they are very fast and very reliable,
so that's the one we looked up for our final charging station,
because we have to get to the airport in just a few hours
for our trip back to the USA.
Yes, so we can't be late, we tried to leave ourselves a little bit of wiggle room,
but we don't have that much, so it kind of has to all work out perfectly, and so far...
finally, it is.
We're gonna be flying out of Munich, so our trip is going to end right where it began.
We have gone a whopping 2,000 or so kilometers on this trip.
Our goal in this final installment, we are going to get back on the road,
we're gonna try to make it to the airport in time and not miss our flight,
but we also wanted to share with you guys our final thoughts,
what it was like travelling in the electric campervan, would we do it again?
- Yeah. - Stay tuned for that.
This was our first time ever in an electric vehicle,
let alone an electric campervan doing a roadtrip.
So, we learned a lot,
and we have a lot of, I guess new knowledge that we can hopefully share with you
if you're thinking about booking one of these.
Yeah, I think we're gonna get all charged up and then hit the road.
So we'll see you there.
So, Allison has been doing most of the driving,
mainly because I've been filming and finding all the charging stations.
And sleeping a little bit.
Yes, a little bit.
So, what has it been like now that you've driven this electric vehicle for about 2 weeks?
Yeah, it's been very interesting. There were things to learn.
For example, you have 3 different
levels of power when you're driving.
If you're going downhill for example, you're in the green Charge,
where it's actually charging your battery for you.
When you hit a good cruising speed, you're in the Eco mode,
so you're using some of the battery, but efficiently.
And then when you have to speed up, go really fast,
you get into the Power mode and that seems to drain the battery quite a bit.
So we've been trying to not go up into that top Power mode,
which means that I speed up a lot more slowly.
And also, the top cruising speed is around 110 kilometers per hour,
so I'm slower in general.
So I felt a little bad on some roads, I feel like we're the slowpokes.
A huge part of the learning curve, as you guys saw, was just figuring out how to charge properly,
which charger works for our type of vehicle.
You guys saw that we went to the Testla charging station which fits ours,
but it doesn't charge it.
In the PlugShare app that we've been using to find places to charge,
if you search for the orange one, which I believe is the CCS2 type,
that is the type that fits ours but has these 2 extra plugs,
which make it charge a lot faster.
- The supercharger. - Yeah.
At first, we were just searching for the green ones, which can take 5 hours to charge.
So when we plugged it in, we were like "this isn't really gonna work,
cause we're only gonna be here for about an hour".
And then, really just planning the route ahead of time as much as possible and having a fail-safe.
So, if we find one and looks like it's gonna work, we're just gotta assume that that might not work.
And then we find another one that's close by or at least within like 10 or 20 kilometers.
Always have a backup.
We've really just been trying to stay above our quarter charge on the battery,
and that seems to have gotten us everywhere we needed to go.
Yeah, we didn't break down at the side of the road, we didn't need to toe.
- I'm pretty happy about that. - I know, pretty proud of us,
'cause we had some big driving days. I guess also, if you're planning your route,
I wouldn't go over more than 200 kilometers in one drive.
Otherwise, you could potentially run into trouble,
or just constantly be having to find extra charging stations along your route.
Sleeping in the van has been very interesting.
For us, it's not that big of a deal, because we've slept in a lot of confined spaces,
we've stayed in a lot of campervans, we've stayed in a lot of tiny houses.
But I can see how it would be for everybody,
because it is quite cramped back there.
It is, but with 2 of us, both with two suitcases
and two backpacks and food,
I wouldn't say it ever felt too crowded in here.
- It was manageable, at least for us. - Yeah.
One of our goals at the beginning of this trip when we set out was to just create less waste,
and since we're in an electric vehicle, we were like "alright,
let's try to make a little bit less trash on this roadtrip".
And in general, I feel like we succeeded.
We did make a bit of trash, and as you guys have seen,
we've been recycling along the way, and Europe has made that very very easy,
because there are recycling centers like this all over the place.
We did have just a couple plastic bottles.
If we wanted to get water at the hotel, they would usually put it in a plastic bottle.
And then of course, we did have a few glass bottles, mostly wine and beer.
And we actually haven't purchased one single-use coffee cup this entire trip,
which that's a lot for us, because we drink a lot of coffee, you guys.
Alright, we're all charged up, we're all recycled up.
Let's hit the road.
This is some of our favourite sceneries yet.
We are just driving through all these hills, we're in the clouds right now.
There's clouds wrapping all around all the hills and the mountains and the forestland.
This trip is really throwing all this beauty at us at the very end.
I know, it's like the most beautiful drive ever.
And then we're gonna go straight from this to being on an airplane for hours like a bunch of yokels.
But alright, we have about 45 minutes to Munich,
we're going to drop off the car.
Hopefully there's no damage that we're not aware of.
I don't remember hitting anything.
And then it's gonna be off to the airport.
We've dropped out our campervan.
All was well.
I'm kind of sad to leave it behind now.
- It was so much fun. - Yeah. It was.
Bye, Space Tour.
And just like that, our incredible roadtrip
through Europe is over.
- Over. I'm so sad it's over. - Yeah.
As you can see, we traded in our nice fancy electric vehicle
for old gas-guzzler here.
But man, we really squeezed the last little bits out of summer while we were travelling through Italy,
because as you can see behind us, it is very very fall right now.
100% fall.
But the plus side of that is it's very beautiful.
The leaves are changing all over the place, it's awesome.
We had such an incredible time travelling through Europe.
Saw so many amazing sites, met so many awesome people, had a blast.
If you missed any of our European roadtrip adventure,
all those videos are gonna be linked in the description below, so check it out.
And we want to give a huge thank you to DW Travel
for helping us coordinate this whole adventure.
We had such a blast, it was such a unique experience,
and we couldn't have done it without them.
That's all for us, you guys. For now.
We'll see you in the next one.