We reached Shkoder in Albania at around 8 p.m.. The first hotel that we approached could only offer a Schuko on their tiny parking lot (we learned: start with hotels further outside the city than with the ones right in the city center. The more downtown a hotel is, the less parking-space it has). The next 2 or 3 hotels didn’t want to let us charge at all. We got lucky a bit outside of town in a pretty low class hotel that was befriended with a car repair shop on the opposite side of the street.

The hotel manager introduced us to the car repair people and they, like any car people, were curious about the Tesla Model S and wanted to help us. We tried for about 1 hour to make their three-phase outlet work with our NRGkick. The car or the NRGkick didn’t take the electricity, no matter what we tried. It was the first time that we were charging without the 5^th, protective conductor. In the end, we gave up and charged the car on the Schuko in the car shop. The car charged about 40% during the night. We weren’t sure if we could make it with a 60% battery till Guijan in Kosovo the next day. Charging somewhere else on a three-phase outlet would be an option.

 

Benedikt met a person from Gijan a few weeks ago in Switzerland, while getting new summer tires. Bekim, who became a good friend of ours while staying in Kosovo and who is an excellent host, gave us the address of a car repair place on our way from Shkoder to Kosovo. The people there offered us a three-phase outlet (11kW) that let us charge just enough so that we would easily reach Gijan, the city in Kosovo where Bekim lives. We charged for about 1,5 hours, made a little walk through the village and left for Kosovo shortly after. In the early evening, we arrived in Gijan.