The estimated journey time was three hours and a couple of minutes so we did not press to leave unduly early. After a call at the marina office to leave keys - 'just in case' - we were on our way before 11.30. Apart from one fairly short stretch, traffic flowed very well unlike a longer section in the opposite direction.
A comfort break was called as we neared the end of the M42, just before joining the M5. Hopwood Park is a single site attached to a junction. We have not been there in recent times and were surprised that there was a queue from the junction onto the service area. It seems that this is a constant issue as staff were deployed to attempt to alleviate the problem by directing traffic. It still took us 20 minutes to get onto an EV charger. Every part of the site had slow moving or queuing vehicles and quite a number, perhaps in frustration, ignored the signs about not parking in EV slots. Having an ICE number plate does rather give the game away, as well as the lack of a plugged in cable!
However, there were plenty of chargers free - and a lot more being installed - and we chose a supplier that we had not seen before: AppleGreen. After we had made a quick trip to the loos and back to the car, it was close to fully charged. We had only eaten a small part of our lunch when the system declared that we were fully charged. We reset our satnav, now to point homewards and we arrived just one minute quicker. In the evening we had our traditional visit to a local chippy for our evening meal
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