Friday...24 May 2013

We left Alice Springs and travelled north to Wycliffe Well. This place markets itself as the UFO capital of Australia with the claim that there are more sightings here than any where else. The buildings have some lovely murals painted by a talented artist and there are little green (fibreglass) men all over the place but the only lights in the sky I saw were from the caravan next door who left their outside light on all night! Quite a nice place to pull up but no phone reception and snowy TV that was too hard to watch. Our satellite dish did not want to work and on our first night there it rained, it rained really really hard. We found out that the rubber membrane on the roof was perished when water dripped onto our bed at 2 am during the down pour! Mad scramble to move mattress to a dry area of the van and put buckets down to catch the water. Not a lot of fun but we were able to fashion a running repair in the light of day allowing us to continue the great trek and not have to back track to arrange seriously expensive repairs.

We ended up travelling for 9 and a half hours today. This was not the plan, but the plan went out the window  when we arrived to find the parks full at each possible stop along the way. We said blow it all, we will go and free camp, and wouldn't you know it, they were full too! Yes folks, the annual migration is in full swing and another million grey nomads are on the move following the sun to warmer winter weather!
We had no phone reception from Alice Springs to Tennant Creek and then again until we reached Mataranka where we finally stopped as the sun was setting and the kangaroos were beginning to bounce across the road.
 Dug deep into the memory bank and used an old public telephone at a roadhouse to ring my younger brother for his 60th birthday on Wednesday and after wading through missed calls and text messages at Tennant Creek this morning I was on air long enough to call my sister today for her birthday but five minutes later as we pulled out of there we were off air yet again. Got the giggles at one stage as we passed a Telstra Countrywide billboard on the road side just after our reception dropped out!
We passed the daily bike rider sitting on a hillock eating his lunch in the middle of nowhere, he had great scenery so I hope it helped his digestion.
While we were at Wycliffe Well we went 22 kms up the road to see the Devils Marbles. Awesome.