Again we stayed a couple of days at Manbulloo Homestead just outside of Katherine. We took the opportunity to do some washing and clean the car and caravan, it has not looked this clean for ages. As we were heading to Alice Springs on bitumen road we thought it was worth cleaning everything up. We headed out all rested and ready for more adventure just look at how clean everything came up.
It was strange being back on busy roads with the road trains and passing through townships here and there with no dust up ya nostrils!!! Wow when we stop we wont even have to clean out the van before we can go inside and sit down, what a treat! Don’t get me wrong it has all been fun and at the time we just took it for granted that that was what we had to do but not to have to do it every time we pull up for a while will be bliss. We stopped for lunch at the Three Ways roadhouse it has changed somewhat from when we were last here many years ago. The road train was still painted on the side of the roadhouse so I got Emma to pose on the bulbar as I had gotten Scott and Jamie to do many years before. It brought back lots of good memories. I could not believe passing cyclists on the road, they have to just a little bit barmy surely. Mind you, we did pass some on the Gibb River road too!
Before we found ourselves a site for the night we popped in to have a look at The Devils Marbles which is an area covered in what look like oversized marbles. Just this one area of these rocks, we did not bother getting out to look at them because we had had a long day and needed to pull up before dark. Jock and I had great photos of these from years ago when you could just walk among them, now they are fenced off and a resort built behind them. This time we just took some photos from the roadside. Won’t ever go back there would rather hold on to the old memories of the site. Worth a visit if you have never been before.
We found our free camp for the night it was just a rest area at the side of the road we parked up in such a way that we put our fire on the other side of our vans and our outlook was just bush. We couldn’t have a big fire but it was a good one. When we were about to go to bed I worried that the fire was still quite aglow so I sat a bit longer and Michelle joined me. Then when we decided it was too cold to stay out so thought we might cover the fire with dirt!!!!!! DO NOT EVER DO THIS! Michelle got a shovel and proceeded to put dirt on the fire, omg the smoke it created, it was billowing. She put another couple of shovel loads on hoping to smother it and before we knew it we were heading for our vans running away from the smoke. As we got to the other side of the vans we realised the whole car park had been filled with the smoke, we could not stop laughing and jumped in our vans and shut the door.
Douglas's Downunder 