Not Before Time

Sometimes on long drives if the scenery doesn’t grab me or if David and I run out of things to talk about, or if he doesn’t want to listen to me prattle on anymore, I might get a bit restless and start looking for other things to do.  This usually involves reading, doing crosswords or knitting, but the other day I didn’t want to do any of those things, so I started fiddling with my camera, figuring I really should get more familiar with this piece of equipment (so those of you who give me a hard time about the lack of photos, I am trying!) and thought I’d put up a couple of photos of the view out the windscreen rather than out the passenger side window.  And just so you know, there’s naked feet coming up!  There is also a shot showing the view from the driver’s perspective.  The things you do!

Gemtree

About 140kms north of Alice Springs is Gemtree where we stayed for 2 nights so we could go fossicking.  Gemtree’s a real bush park and the facilities are very good.  They run fossicking tag along tours where you follow a driver out to the gemfields, they give you all the tools (sieves, water etc), show you how to do it and what you should be looking for, and they leave you to it.  You can choose to do either a garnet or a zircon tour.  We’ve already fossicked for zircons so chose the garnet tour.  We spent about 6 hours fossicking and ended up with about 17/18 usable garnets (ones that can be cut and set as earrings, necklaces etc) and a bunch of others that are too small or flawed to use in settings.  There were plenty of people there with us and we were all checking out what each other had found when we heard shouts of discovery.  We also ended up with sunburn, sore backs and sore legs, but we had a lot of fun. 

We also stopped at Banka Banka for a night.  Banka Banka was once a working station which now offers campground facilities for travellers.  There isn’t any power, but the sites are lovely and grassy and the toilets and showers are brilliant.  The water here is from underground springs and is so clear and pure.  Lovely to drink.  Amazing to think there’s heaps of water under the ground when above it is so dry, but it happens quite frequently out here.  There’s a tiny bar where you can buy a drink to sip on while you watch a slideshow and listen to a talk about life on a station.  The slideshow is really interesting and you get to ask as many questions as you like.  There is also a border collie called Jenny and 2 turkeys.  Jenny obviously has a very strong instinct for rounding up critters, because she gives the turkeys a lot of grief, constantly stalking them and trying to herd them where she thinks they should go.  One thing you need to do while you’re here is to make sure you close your car doors or this is where Jenny herds the turkeys.  You could go away with Christmas dinner in your car

While at Banka Banka we met up with Suzanna who is travelling around in her fantastic rig – we managed to get a photo of both rigs side by side – I think David and Goliath were mentioned.  

Well, our time in Adelaide has come to an end!  We’ll be leaving here tomorrow morning, heading north again – this time to Darwin with a couple of stopovers on the way – one of them being Gemtree where we might get in some fossicking. 

Once again we’ve had a great time in Adelaide, spending a lot of time with our friends Steve and Jill.  Our son Ben also came over to visit us bringing his girlfriend the lovely Kat with him and we had a great weekend with them.  Then our friend Trevor visited Adelaide for work so we got to catch up with him too.  So overall it’s been a great few weeks.

We also celebrated our 35th anniversary last week – by booking into a city hotel for a couple of nights.  The hotel had a spa so we got to have a soak in the tub which we haven’t been able to do for a while.  I took the camera with me but for some reason didn’t get around to using it all that much although I was planning to (not to take photos of us in the spa – wouldn’t inflict that on anyone!) but I was going to take photos of the room, and of the lovely meal we had at Blanc, a really nice seafood restaurant in Adelaide, and of the Sunday market.  Instead I strolled around oblivious to all the photo opportunities even though the camera was in my handbag and the weather was superb, perfect for photos.  I’m really not very good at this photo stuff .

We’re both really looking forward to getting back on the road again.  We’ll probably be out of contact for a few days as phone and internet service isn’t that great for a big part of the trip north, but I’ll update (with photos hopefully) within the next week or so.

Meanwhile, drop us an email and let us know how things are going with you, we would love to hear from you.