Darwin 2012–Katherine to Alice Springs

This update encompasses 2 days of travel, Katherine to Three Ways station and then Three Ways to Alice Springs. We are on our homeward stretches now.

Before we get into the trip, here are some animals i photographed at Rachel's before we headed off.

We left Katherine a bit later than we normally would as we saw the kids off to their school busses first, then off we went. The trip was mostly uneventful with the only really interesting part where we needed to stop due to a truck accident. From the chatter over the radio it seems the driver was OK, a few cuts and bruises. The truck, a tanker road train, “chucked a wobbly” and from that it seems the last trailer out of how many we are not sure, but normally four, started to wobble all over the road. i suspect it then unhitched and went over the embankment. We got there at the end of the recovery operation.

After that excitement we pulled into Three Ways happy to get out of the caravan. Unfortunately the park did not live up to expectations. We stopped here as we wanted to avoid Tennant Creek, somewhere we had heard nothing good about, but the park turned out to be the worst of the whole trip. The water out of all the taps, including the showers, was brown, smelled and we paid more for a night here than in Alice Springs. We would not recommend staying here to anyone.

I did, however, get an opportunity in the evening for some Astrophotography. I am in the process of stacking and post processing the images but below is some single frames that have turned out OK. With the moon now almost gone the sky looks great.

 

We awoke early the next day to find the starts still out, however after a brown water shower, the sun was rising and we were on the road again.

We had a few stops however the highlight, as always, was the Devils Marbles. We stopped here again for photos and during one of my climbing missions i grazed my leg, taking a sizable bit of meat away. Not Happy.

The camp ground at the rear of the marbles looked good and had a number of campers just puling out for the day. We also stopped at the Ti Tree roadhouse for lunch, where we caught up with the trailer from yesterdays accident.

For our stay in Alice Springs the time we have stopped at the G’Day Mate caravan park, on recommendation. So far it is a nice clean park with great amenities. For the first time we even had the park owners park the van on our site for us