Oct 22-23 (Day 265-266) - Alice Springs to 'Hemmi's Camp' (Burt Plain)

Wow! What a long drive! :D

The kids were pretty disappointed to be leaving the Cole's as they really enjoyed the company of other kids, but we did want to keep moving with our travels.

 

As we headed out of town from the Cole's place we made our way to the shops to quickly pick up something for lunch then to the library as I still had some work to do, while Mim did some top-up food shopping. Matt came with his muscles to help carry it all back!

As we were leaving town there was an eerie red glow in the sky on the horizon which we initially thought was a bushfire! But after a bit we realised it was more the colour of the red dirt, and with the growing wind it was obviously a dust storm. As we drove we could feel the strong winds, and the poor Pajero was guzzling fuel as we headed uphill out of Alice Springs into a head wind! Thankfully it didn't last for long and then we were through it and on the other side where the sky was normal again. We thought it best to head back to our favourite spot in the bush so we could have some signal to keep an eye on business stuff, so off to find our tracks and head into the bush.

No not a bushfire - just a big dust storm plus some clouds!

 

 

This is probably an appropriate time to talk about our latest...

 

Travel Plans

Our planned route for the next
few weeks, God willing

Our plans have changed plenty of times throughout this trip! And that's fine really, it's one of the nice things about not having a fixed schedule, that we can tweak the schedule and plan as circumstances change.

The original intention had been to drive into Mt Isa and then down the Birdsville Track, but we had to change this to Alice Springs for an orthodontist appointment for Bek (which didn’t end up happening) and to pick up the solar blanket (which did). We figured while we were down this way we may as well check out Kings Canyon, about which we’d heard lots of good reports. Our whole time in and around Alice has taken longer than we expected, but it’s allowed us to research the different travel options, which were essentially continue down the Stuart Highway into SA, or somehow make our way across into QLD and come via the Birdsville Track as originally intended.

We didn't really like the thought of driving all the way back up to Daly Waters to meet up with the Barkly Highway that runs east into Queensland around Mt Isa, but in our research we discovered the 'Plenty Highway' which runs parallel to this and starts only about 50km north of Alice! It runs from the Stuart Highway to the QLD/NT border, after which it turns into the Donohue Highway and carries on in Queensland to the town of Boulia. We'd actually driven along part of this on our first trip in 2017 when we visited Gemtree and its garnet fields.

So our intention from here is to take the 700km drive east along the Plenty Highway and Donohue Highways, then drive south to Birdsville and into South Australia via the Birdsville Track. Apparently this is a reasonably-maintained unsealed road so should be better than most of what we’ve covered in the past.

So while we were at the library earlier today I'd completed the QLD border pass applications, which gives us about a week to get into QLD.

 

My poor injured soldiers

So back the diary and our 'overnight stop' at Hemmi's Camp in Burt Plain - and like so many of our 'overnight stops' things didn't quite work out that way! We had been keen to move on with our travels, but in the evening while going over things we discovered a few things which would require yet another visit to Alice Springs!

1.  The cover on the caravan's power inlet had broken a while ago, I'd glued it up but it was now broken again and the cover kept flapping around and it was just a matter of time until it broke off (irritatingly, this is the third one of these we've had to replace on this trip - the second power inlet replacement and we also had to replace the power outlet on the other side once)
2.  Jude had taken a tumble off a scooter on his way home from dropping the kids at school with Nat and we found we only had one wound dressing left
3. and last but not least, when setting up camp one of the parts on the caravan awning had broken (the lever handle you use to adjust the length of the awning arms).

While we didn't really want to turn around and go back into the town we'd just left, it seemed even sillier to drive into some of the most remote parts of Australia with three known issues, two of which (caravan parts) we weren't likely to be able to buy until Pt Augusta.

So next morning we had our normal morning routine - coffee, breakfast, morning Bible reading and then got on with some school and business work, before heading back into Alice Springs after lunch. As the days were warming up we figured we'd appreciate the air conditioning in the shops and work in the van before things warmed up.

The shopping trip was pretty uneventful. There was only one caravan shop in town which sold the parts we needed - JC's Caravan Repairs. It was a really more of a caravan repair shop than a parts shop, but they also had a few spare parts on some shelves for their use but they sold them to the public too. It was a grubby bit of a place, it was simply a big shed full of caravans with some tensa-barriers to stop customers coming any further than 5m into the shed - there was no reception area, no nothing! If you can picture a typical mechanics shop but imagine caravans instead of cars, you'll get the idea. They were pricey too - $60 for a power point (we'd paid $30 for the last one in Townsville) and $50 for the awning arm, and cash only! Still, there was nothing for it as there were no other options so we paid up and got the bits we needed. We also dropped into Desert Dwellers which is a much larger camping shop like a BCF and collected a few bits and pieces we needed. Oh and of course the new awning arm came with a pop rivet, so we had to go to Bunnings to buy a pop rivet gun to pop ONE SINGLE rivet! Then back to the shops to get the wound dressings, and back to the van to put it all in!

Afternoon at Hemmi's Camp, near Alice Springs

-- Greg