In the evening, we reached Trabzon and drove a little more eastward towards a Novotel situated right at the Black Sea. Unfortunately, the hotel did not have any room available. With a bit of research, we found in the hills above Trabzon, all covered with hazelnut bushes, a small hotel. The hotel seemed newly constructed, but kind of abandoned. We observed since almost the beginning of our journey that people somehow like to start constructing buildings and often never finish. Like many, many real estate projects, also this one must have been a good idea at some point, but clearly not thought through all the way (who needs a big, impersonal hotel in the middle of nowhere?).
Besides all of this, we found a good, cheap and clean place to sleep there and the owner could offer us a Schuko socket/outlet in the non-public garage of the hotel. Since we planned to stay for two nights in Trabzon, Schuko should have been fine. We didn’t know what would happen later that evening though…
The problem that appeared was in relation to a nice dinner we had in a small, just opened restaurant not far from the hotel. The owner of the restaurant took very well care of us, we liked the food and felt comfortable in the small restaurant. It seems like they still need to work on their kitchen hygiene though, since Benedikt did not feel good after we returned and threw up during the whole upcoming night.
He was knocked out the day after. Since the small hotel really did not feel like the place where Benedikt could get well again (too cold, too foggy, too strange…), we moved to the Novotel at the Black Sea (they had free rooms that night). The car was at about 70% charged and we knew of a charging station, again at a Renault Dealership (check out this post for our previous experience with charging at Renault), close to the Novotel. After lots of sleep, Benedikt felt better the upcoming day.
That Sunday, we picked up Nici, a friend of ours, at the airport. He would accompany us the upcoming week. On the way towards the airport our Autopilot suddenly turned off and an error message, saying that we should go to a Tesla Service Center if this problem continues, appeared in the Tesla display. We had the same problem in Zurich only one month before we left. Back in Switzerland, the Tesla service center took a whole morning to fix it. Benedikt and I were nervous that we wouldn’t have Autopilot on the rest of our trip (that would be awful! We use it so much).
While we charged at the Renault in Trabzon, Benedikt talked to a Tesla Service person for about 20 minutes, explaining our problem. He promised that some Tesla mechanics will work on our problem the next day, but he didn’t make us too much hope that it can be fixed from distance. Continue reading the next post, to see what happened the next day.
At the Renault place, we let the car charge for about one hour (unfortunately only one phase was working – Turkish electricity is sometimes a bit confusing). We left with about 75% of the battery charged. To be on the safe side, we knew that we should better find a hotel with three-phase electricity that night. Luckily we did so (see this post).