Taking a breather in Alice Springs

cooking hash browns on the fire

Two more driving days in a row and we were happy to arrive into Alice Springs for a late lunch today. The kids have really done very well with all of this driving and packing up every morning, so we’ve decided to stay here for 2 nights. The caravan parks are really not that flash but ours has a tavern attached where we’ve just treated ourselves to the $10 Sunday roast, which was really a good deal. You got to serve yourself the veggies so we more than got our money’s worth. There was also free entertainment, and we caught the end of a reptile guy showing snakes and lizards, followed by a couple of guys with guitars firming targeting the grey nomad demographic with Australia All Over type songs and jokes from the 1950’s. It was 4 loads of washing this afternoon, and we’re now all in clean clothes, with clean hair, clean bodies (I had to get the nail brush out) and feeling generally … clean. It will be short lived but is nice while it lasts. It’s not that warm during the day here, about 19 or 20, which is quite a bit colder than we’ve been used to (but hardly Canberra temperatures), but at least the nights are only about 5 degrees apparently, not into minus which someone else mentioned that they had experienced in June here.

Tomorrow we’ll go out to the desert park and do a few bits of shopping that we had to save up for a ‘big town’, and plan where to after Uluru – we will have to decide which gorges we have time to go to in the McDonnell Ranges and which we don’t, as it’s a long drive up to Darwin.