We were up about half an hour before sunrise to start packing & be ready to take the car into the garage by 8am.  The windscreen on the car was clear & I thought, “good, not so cold”, however, as the sun rose, the windscreen froze & my fingers were numb from touching all the metal & wet parts as I was packing things away.  By the time we got the car across the other side of Alice Springs, parked in the front of the garage & unhitched the Karavan it was 8.30am. The people at Centralian Motors kindly gave us a lift into town so that we could absentee vote for the upcoming elections, do a little more grocery shopping & have a last look around town.  It was busy at the electorate office as the voting papers had finally arrived & a lot of other visitors were in there doing the same as we did.

We had a good look through the old Government Administration Building that was a modest dwelling, however, by early Alice Springs standards it was large, with four bedrooms.  The buildings main claim to fame was the hosting of the Royal Couple (the Queen & Phil) during a short visit in 1963. (the Queens bathroom was stripped bare so no one could sit on her throne). There was a subsequent visit by Charles & Dianne not long after they were married. Charles & some other guests got food poisoning, it was 40 plus degrees and it took 1 & ½ days to prepare the food & very poor refrigeration. The funny part about this was that Charles had to have brand new toilets wherever he went, he wouldn’t use one after anyone else but that day he didn’t care.  It was quite interesting with period furniture, photos & information panels throughout the building.

I also took the opportunity to invest in a new wide angle lens for the camera, the scenery here is just amazing & the existing lenses I have just don’t have a wide enough field of view. (nor has this new lens, you have to be here to see it, no wide lens will do justice to the scenery). This new lens should hopefully improve the situation as we travel to the Bungles & the Kimberleys. He is just a spendthrift.

We picked up the few groceries at Woolies, had a bite to eat then were picked up by the Centralian Motors courtesy car & taken back to the garage to the car with a new shock absorber.  Sue & John had also finished all the bits & pieces they wanted to do & were waiting for us.

Hitched up to the Karavan again & off to the Tanami Track.  We travelled a shade over 200kms and stopped at Tilmouth Wells where we refuelled, topped up the diesel tank in the Karavan (for the first time during our trip) & filled our spare jerrycan.  We decided to camp at Tilmouth Wells for the night in the adjoining campground, quickly set up amidst the chirping of budgerigars & other birds then went for a walk across the creek next to the campground.  The trees are alive with budgerigars looking for nesting sites.  Back to camp for some pate & cheese, plus a nice bottle of sparkling red that John had chilled.  Dinner was a combined effort of John & Tereza & we had another superb fish & vegies.

It was good to finally leave Alice Springs, we have been here before and seen most of the tourist sites, but Ron & I still managed to find some more chasms, gorges, gaps, dry river beds (that is what they are here) bush tracks that needed to be walked, climbed & trees & flowers to be admired & photographed.  In town, shops that needed to be shopped in, we sure did boost Alice Springs’ economy. John & Sue went to the Desert Park & loved it.  We saw it before.

At 2.15 pm we headed for the desert.  We drove mainly on single lane bitumen.   When a big road train approached we would pull over and stop – they go fast. We travel at 90kms/hr with very many stops. The scenery is quite beautiful, the surrounding area is flat as a pancake (red sand with some tufts of grass) but further in the distance the mountains just pop up from the ground & look spectacular.  We are camping at a bush camp, no electricity but they have good hot showers.  The day after tomorrow we should be crossing over the Western Australian boarder so we are starting to cook up our vegetables & eat all our fruit because they have very strict quarantine.