Once again we awoke and the caravan was fairly deserted as most of the grey nomads had already hit the road, gee the sound deadening qualities of this caravan are good.
Just as we left the caravan park, I received a text from the bike riders and they had just arrived at Tennant Creek and we having a rest and refuelling so we continued on our way south – they would catch us soon enough.
It wasn’t until Devils Marbles that they caught us and overtook us. We caught up with them again at around the 200 km mark as they stopped to do a “splash and dash refuel” in a rest area.
At Ti Tree, we all met up again for lunch with the bikes refuelling. I didn’t bother as there should be enough fuel to get us to Alice Springs, besides I wasn’t going to pay $1.75 a litre for diesel.
This would have been the longest distance I have driven without stopping for a Geocache. I have been up and down this road quite a few times in the last 5 years and have found all the caches in this stretch. For the record, it was 500 kilometres without a cache find this trip.
We all arrived in Alice Springs at 3:30 pm. After we all refuelled (we ended up with 10 litres of my 125 litres left in the tank), the bikes went to Alice Springs Harley for bike bits and we went across the road from them to Alice Springs Hydraulic Service for caravan bits.
When we left Jayco Darwin on Monday, they were organising for a part for the bed slideout to be shipped to Alice Springs to be ready for Alice Springs Hydraulic Service to do the work. I walked in and they looked blankly at me. It appears that they hadn’t been told the work would be carried out by their workers and also the part hadn’t arrived. After a few phone calls it appears that the part had only just left Melbourne so it will arrive after we have left Alice Springs. Looks like we will be getting it fixed in Adelaide. Hopefully Jayco extend our warranty until it is fixed.
The fun continued when we arrived at the Big 4 Caravan Park. I had booked our site for 4 days online from Tennant Creek last night and included the length of the van as requested. Apparently the online site takes no notice of the length added and just allocates the next available site. The site we had been allocated was way too small for our van.
The woman behind the desk was doing her hardest to get us onto an appropriate site with some chess moves over the 4 days when her supervisor came across and grabbed to site we were being put onto for someone else. A woman that had been here for 11 days was not happy that she was opposite where all the school tours were camping and wanted to move, so she grabbed the site that was being made ready for us and we took her site. The only problem is that she had to pack up here van to move.
We went and parked next to the site and waited for them to move, it looked like the husband was about to have a heart attack doing all the packing up while she talked with the neighbours. I know who wears the pant in that relationship. While we moved in another 2 school tour buses arrived and camped across the road from us – this could be interesting. After they were all set up, the drivers parked the buses between us and them and we didn’t hear any noise from the school kids at all.
It was $10 schnitzel night at the Todd Tavern and it was organised to meet up with the bike crew for tea and a few drinks. It was very busy but we availed ourselves to some tables outside. This will probably one of the few nights left where we can enjoy a meal outside as we are headed back to winter with a passion down south.
