Theory verus practice--the car hire

It's fair to say that in our Easter 2023 sojourn we visited more sites, in total number, than any other.  We definitely visited many but...not as many as we otherwise would have.  Before discussing those sites, some words are necessary about our transportation plan...namely, the car hire.

April 5, 2023--Gun Knowe Loch, Tweedbank, looking for a charging station

Readers of Whitley's World know we are big on planning transportation, and advocate car hires to reach rural or distant locations.  

Serendipity often misses the bus, so to speak.  Thus, it is wise be sure of your transportation options to avoid unnecessary hassle and overlong waits.  After all, vacation time overseas is valuable.  So too is the quality of that time.  Obviously, spending time stranded at a station or bus stance for hours is not exactly the quality time you pay a premium to go do. 

Even at that, best laid plans are no panacea to occasional problems, as our 2023 excursion demonstrated.

Travelers to Scotland have a number of transport options--train, bus, ferry, car hire, or a combination of these (as was true for parts of our 2023 excursion).  Hooking them together is challenging, but also part of the fun...like the Enigma Machine solving code.  Urban inter-city main trunk rail connections, such as  Glasgow-Edinburgh-Berwick, run every 15 minutes or so.  Those are easy.  Other routes, like the Borders Railway (which we used get to Edinburgh for a few days from Galashiels) are about every half hour.  So, tolerable waits.  But elsewhere, less so.   

April 1, 2023--Rail bridge on River Tweed, Berwick over which we crossed our 1st night

Scotrail's network is not uniformly available.  It doesn't service everywhere, especially not rural villages like those in the Borders just beyond the reach of the Galashiels railhead.  Unless one gets a car hire (i.e. car rental) bus transportation becomes a necessary next choice to travel to small villages (which often hold true gems for visitors and can be well worth the effort.)

We have found Scottish and English bus routes to be fairly reliable, normally within 10 or 15 minutes of the posted schedule in rural regions and pretty much spot on in the large cities.  The caveat being finding posted bus schedules at some stances.  You cannot always walk up to a bus stop and find timetables because local delinquents seem to think pulling timetables off the bulletin boards is humorous.  So know before you go.  That's easy enough.  Bus timetables and route numbers can be gotten online, and are actually accurate.  Word to the wise when time may be an issue if you must transfer buses.

Small hamlets like Duddo (closest bus stop to the "nearby" Bronze Age standing stone circle) is four miles south of the Scottish Borders, in farmland.  In theory, it has a bus.  In practice, eh.  Scheduled rural bus services may be many hours apart...with no pub in sight even using 10X optics.  Simply put, remote sites in the Borders (some rich in historical interests) are practically unworkable by public transportation.    

 

April 4, 2023--at Melrose public lot trying to figure charging station out

Knowing that, the core of our in-country transportation plan for the Borders over Easter 2023 was a car hire.  We figured it would be a routine hire, as we've done three times on Easter sojourns there.  It wasn't.  Basically only one company rents cars in the Borders--Enterprise in Galashiels.  And yes, it's that Enterprise, the car rental franchise.  Unfortunately, our car hire did not fully cooperate with the goal of getting to several distant sites efficiently with our time. 

How so?  Well, the crux of the problem is a distinction between "theory" and "practice".  In theory, we had a crackerjack car.  In theory, it was an upgrade from what we ordered.  We were given a brand new Peugeot e-208..."e" as in electric.  Electric and French.  A "lib'ral" two f'er.  Despite a general disdain of most things French, I actually liked the car.  The Peugeot e-208 is among the most affordable quasi-luxury electrics on the market.  Its paint was deep and flawless.  It's Europe's top selling e-car.  Sporty, plenty of zip.  Comfortable. Nunnery quiet. Chock full of gee-gaws and gadgets; so many that the two of us had not figured out all the individual functions before we returned it.  In short, cutting edge tech.  Maybe too much so.

April 4, 2023 a little mudded from Eildon Hills in the fancy Peugeot 2-20

And there's a problem.  Seldom can one engineer away the human dimension.  Despite how advanced electric vehicles are.  Personally, they have been put on road perhaps five or ten years in front of the infrastructure necessary to make them useful.  Infrastructure like charging points, the single most important issue, needs to be resolved for foreign visitors to Scotland.  

No question we are at an inflection point, moving away from internal combustion toward electric.  Nearly mimicking history, electric models like the Peugeot e-208 are having similar issues to those in the world's first long distance field test of an internal-combustion engine automobile, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen Model III.  On August 5, 1888, after trundling her two young teenage sons along, without telling her inventor husband or getting permission from authorities for the road trip, Mrs. Benz made her historical 120 mile drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim.  She literally invented solutions to mechanical problems on the fly.  

Then as now, fuel was problematic.  The Benz Model III used ligroin, a laboratory solvent that was only available at apothecaries (pharmacies) at the time.  So, Mrs. Benz used drug stores as her fueling stations.  Similarly, electric cars are restricted to charging stations...and that gets us into the human factor.  When we picked up the Peugeot from Enterprise, it only had 50 miles range remaining.  I had no choice.  It was the only car hire in the stable.  Still, one should think it would be let fully charged.  After receiving erroneous information about how and where it could be recharged, we were dispatched on a nearly week long tour supposedly with a 50 "unlimited" mile range.  

50 miles in no way is sufficient for a week long tour.  Charging the vehicle was paramount.  Little did we know it would be so laborious.  When we took the Peugeot from Galashiels, our first destination was a trek up Eildon Hills on foot from a car park.  After a tremendous vista, we drove to the public parking lot in Melrose, where a charging station was located.  We struggled to make sense of it.  It took standard credit cards, but nothing worked for us.  The card would be accepted, but the charging cable would not power.  We found out, belatedly, that we could not charge the vehicle because:  (1) we did not live in Scotland, and thus (2) did not have a Scottish Power account, nor (3) a Scottish bank from which to debit the charge.  Enterprise did not tell us this.  Apparently they did not know either.  Those kinds of thing ought to be figured out before letting an e-car.

April 4, 2023--run aground at the Melrose charging point

In all, we spent maybe three hours in Melrose fooling with it.  And still didn't.  Then an angel visited us.  A kind young woman who was parked next to us at the charging station.  One does find angels on occasion in time of need.  She was ours (and quite a baby doll too).  Clearly, she was well off, a professional (I believe she said certified accountant).  Her Mercedes e-model indicated that success.  She spent her valuable time calling Scottish Power and trying to resolve a problem that "an American couple" was having.  

In the end, she wound up letting us charge on her account.  Darla did reimburse her £10 cash or some amount that was probably nowhere near the cost.  We didn't know.  But if we knew her name, we'd send her flowers.  Nor was that charge at Melrose enough to replenish the car's range.  It did permit us about 90 miles--to get us back to Galashiels that evening, and then on a circular trip the next morning in which we had made a commitment to visit Robin Elliot at Andrew Elliot Ltd (woolen mill) in Selkirk.  From Selkirk early that afternoon, we went to Jedburgh where we again attempted to charge the Peugeot.  An English woman at the chargers was also having trouble connecting.  We then returned to Galashiels, with yours truly hot under the collar.  Enterprise would get that @#!!*^^ car back in the morning I vowed. 

Girded for combat the following morning, we returned to Enterprise in Galshiels with the Peugeot.  But, they treated us too nicely for me to be incendiary about it.  I felt guilty.  So it is true, a kind answer turns away wrath just as Scriptures say.  The Enterprise manager took his Scottish Power card with us to the charging station at the Galshiels bus station.  The charge was on the company.  That was a nice gesture, but it still was not enough to gain us the full range (defined as +220 miles) on that fancy ride.  I think we only got to 160 miles.  So the end result was we had to conserve the vehicle charge by trimming a few sites we would've otherwise visited.  The car hire altered our plans.

When we returned the spiffy e-208 Easter Monday and dropped the keys in the drop box and boarded the Borders Railway for Edinburgh, that Peugeot had all of 30 miles range remaining.  So, had we not trimmed a few sites near Coldstream and Norham, it is likely we would've had to abandon the car roadside.  Without a way to recharge it, and many businesses including Enterprise closed for Easter Monday, 30 miles of range was far too thin for comfort considering real life sometimes imposes--traffic, detours, wrecks, stalls.

The Peugeot e-208 was nice; real nice.  A ball of fun.  It was just before its time.  It's average speed was probably about equal to that of Mrs. Benz's Model III.  Even if you do 65 miles an hour, if you have to spend hours recharging it, one sort of loses practicality as well as net speed.