Thursday 7th August – Warm Sunny few clouds – warm overnight

We had an early mark this morning to put the car in for a service.  It wasn’t far to work to town, we had breakfast at Gloria Jeans with a voucher courtesy of the Alice Springs  tourist booklet.

We had a list of items to buy for repairs and back up parts.  We filled in the time waiting for the car to be serviced by doing a little tourist shopping.  We bought our restock groceries and checked the mail for the strut being sent from Melbourne.  Luckily it arrived late yesterday, pretty good timing as it would have cost us to have it forwarded to Broome.  We knew it would be close.

Todd Mall

 

In the town centre changes from last time, it appears that a few stores have closed down and we noticed a large resort for sale.  The mall has the tourist shops and there are three separate shopping centres – only small but well apart.  There is a Harvey Norman on the outskirts.  I still think it would be a hard place to live.  Alice Springs is halfway between Darwin and Adelaide – 1500 klms approximately both ways. There were a few tourists around town.  We haven’t bothered revisiting the highlights this time, as this is only a refuel and restock stop.  We realized that Alice Springs is in the middle of it’s east/west borders, and that we had travelled half across the Northern Territory yesterday. 

 

The Tropic of Capricorn runs through the Territory just north of Alice Springs, so is accounting for the nice warm days.  We are basically in line with Rockhampton at the moment.

 

 

I was dreading our time in the centre because of the cold nights at this time of year, but we have been surprised that we have not been cold at all.

All around town the Sturt Desert Peas are flowering as well as other Central Australia natives.  The landscaping around Alice Springs is very pretty indeed, the city has the back drop of the East and West McDonnell Ranges and rocky outcrops within the town making it very scenic.

 

  

This is what the next camp site to us has brought in their trailer – They are from Victoria and had it running when it was 16c last night…. 

 There are four of them in a tiny tent and pulling a closed in trailer.  They fire up the heater and sit around it.  I can’t imagine carting this all around the place instead of putting on a jumper or if you are that cold thermals.  So it is interesting to see what some people think are essentials in camping.

 

 

We are putting on new replacement mudflaps – these are additional mudflaps to our existing ones, to protect the trailer.  We spotted a driver today with his solar panel permanently mounted on the roof of his car, I guess he has just been lucky with rocks, but it’s a piece of glass just waiting for a stone.

 

Early yesterday I noticed that this guard had a slight kick out from a previous rock, but by the time we got into Alice Springs another rock has just picked up on that slight curve and now we have a panel job to do.  We found a golf ball size rock sitting on the front boot of the camper when we pulled up for morning tea.  These are being thrown up by our car or passing traffic, so we are trying to eliminate as much as we can from our car with all the additional mudflaps.

 

 

We met up with Kangaroo Dundee at the Information Centre today and got a cuddle of a Western Red Kangaroo joey.

https://www.kangaroosanctuary.com/

He explained that all of the “Western Grey’s” I have been seeing even though they are grey, are Red Kangaroos.  Now that explains why some were so grey and other red.  They come in two colours and they call the grey’s – blues. We had seen his TV show on the ABC, so it was interesting to hear him talk about his sanctuary.

 

Tomorrow we head off on the Tanami Road

This is our next stop for about 5 nights.

We turn north from Tilmouth Well Road House for 136 klms to Newhaven and we will return to Tilmouth to continue the Tanami to Hall’s Creek.

http://www.australianwildlife.org/sanctuaries/newhaven-sanctuary.aspx

Down the bottom of the web page there are about 8 detailed PDF on all of the drives and walks around this sanctuary.

There are numerous other of these sanctuaries in Australia.  We are really looking forward to going there as we hope to see some new wildlife that we haven’t seen before.  It is always a thrill to see our native species in their own environment.  I would love to see a Thorny Devil in the wild – if you don’t know what this is, you need to brush up on your home grown critters. :)