That finishes our time in Darwin for another year and the long journey of 3000 kilometres south begins. Today is only a short hop with 300 kilometres to Katherine. Originally the plan was to go through to Mataranka but unless we left at 6am, we would not get a powered site by the time we got there. And I am still on holidays so that is not going to happen. I was on the road by 830am so it was still early for me.
Luckily Garry rang a couple of caravan parks in Katherine as most were full. We found a couple of sites in the Shady Lane Tourist Park which I have stayed at before and is not a bad park far enough out of town to not have the highway noise. Unfortunately you still get the aircraft noise from the flyovers from Tindal Airbase.
Making a few stops along the way for a couple of geocaches I missed on the way up to Darwin, arrival was just after 3pm.
Once again made the fuel fill up at the card only 24 Fill Stop which is 10 cents a litre cheaper than anywhere else in town. Word must be out as there was a queue of caravans waiting but they were only waiting on the main pumps and had not spotted a diesel pump mixed in with the petrol pumps. So no waiting for me.
There was also a queue at the card machine, with it not working properly. I asked those in the queue whether they had pushed the help button and blank looks. They had been waiting for about 5 minutes for something to happen. After pushing the help button, someone came online and reset the machine and it was working straight away.
We believe the main reason for the sudden full caravan parks was tonight was the second game of the Queensland / New South Wales State of Origin and most of the normal free campers came in to watch the game. There was a bit of grumbling with those without satellite not being able to get Channel 9. No problems with the Thompson Taj. Satellite dish up and Channel 9 coming in strong. By the way, Queensland won the game in the last 5 minutes to tie up the series going into the final game – that is very convenient to ensure a large crowd at that game in 3 weeks.
