Devils Marbles, Mataranka Springs & Litchfield NP NT (July - 6 days)

The last six days have seen the Smeads travel 1,700 kms north to some incredible places on the map. Our first stop off was the famous Devils Marbles. We were all in awe of these incredible boulders so called ‘cottage cheese’ and ‘cheese rounds’ (?or rings) because of their stacked formations. The boys scaled these rock towers with ease, while Kate found it hard to keep up with even the girls. The colours were amazing at sunset and we climbed until it grew dark. We watched the dingoes come and go over dinner outside. We were all in a state of climate shock as after the mild days and nippy nights in Alice we were all feeling rather hot at the marbles, shedding our layers at night. The flies in the mouth and nose were the only drawback, thank goodness for fly nets – thanks Garnie and Poppy!!

The next day we drove north to the unremarkable road stop of Daly Waters where the only one of two remaining powered sites we could get was along side the trucks and road trains! We were grateful for the power and water to cool our warmish fridge and top up our water tanks after ‘roughing it’ at the marbles. Tim celebrated his birthday morning at this roadhouse stop off, but we soon hit the road to get to Mataranka Springs to enjoy more of his birthday. After trying one dodgy van park in Mataranka, we found probably the friendliest and one of the best parks we have stayed at on the trip. A sprawling grassy van park with a lily covered dam where we watched barramundi being hand fed and caught…..peacocks that wandered freely and congregated outside the Smeads van to be fed by 3 very enthusiastic children hoping for ‘the prized feather’….a great country bistro on site where we enjoyed dinner. From here we visited the two local thermal springs – Bitter and Mataranka Thermal Springs. We had such fun here – snorkelling and floating down the former and just relaxing in the Mataranka Springs. The constant 34deg water was initially a little disappointing when we felt quite hot, but was delightful in the morning and late afternoon.

From Mataranka we drove to Berry Springs (approx 50kms out of Darwin). This has been our base for exploring Litchfield National Park today. We all loved the waterfalls and swimming holes where we swam and snorkelled with the fish, and tried our best to balance in the water on slippery rocks. We saw amazing fields of magnetic termite mounds and ‘The Lost City’ rock formations. It was a great day! Tomorrow we will move a little closer into Darwin to explore the city.

All travelling very well again. The kids are champions coping with these repeatedly long distances!

Alice & The Red Centre NT (June & July - 21 days!!)

We have all really loved our time in the ‘Red Centre’. We have found Alice Springs to be quite captivating and certainly very unique. The landscape has been spectacular…gorges, water holes, breathtaking escarpments and canyons across the east and west Macdonnell ranges. Uluru and Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) were definitely a highlight. We admired the ‘rock’ from the ground, refraining from the climb out of respect for the Anangu peoples wishes (and not to mention our mutual fear of heights). We were awed by the magnitude of Kata Tjuta and walked in marvelling at the towering rock walls. Kings Canyon wasn’t quite what we were expecting, but we didn’t get the view from the top, being only able to do the base walk with the kids. We did have a great night there though celebrating Harrison’s 7th birthday out for dinner, which was fun.

We thoroughly enjoyed our time with Garnie and Poppy (Tim’s parents) and were all quite teary (Hannah howling actually) at the airport farewelling them. We have since enjoyed some great catch-ups with Kate’s sister Jane holidaying with a friend who lives in Alice.

We have been in the new van for 10 days now and all is going well. It’s virtually the same, so it’s hard to believe when we sit in here at night recording these thoughts that we ever had that horrible couple of weeks at all! We feel so grateful to be back on the road again, able to continue this amazing journey around oz!

Georgie is finally starting to take off with her walking, and can now take around 5-6 steps at a time before joining us in squeals of delight at her achievement! She continues to entertain us every day and has even learnt to do somersaults on the ‘jumping pillow’ at the caravan park, care of the big kids coaching.

We leave Alice tomorrow and begin our journey towards Darwin (also Kakadu, Litchfield N.P., Katherine etc.).

Mt Isa QLD, Tennant Creek to Alice NT (June - 4 days)

From Lawn Hill we were headed for Mt Isa when our most unfortunate turn of events occurred….You know the details…. Everybody fine in body, shaken in spirit, but overwhelmed by God’s goodness in sparing us from injury or worse. Van totalled and beyond repair. Car damaged, but driveable. With the help of some extremely kind fellow travellers Tim got the van to a towable state and we limped it through a slow 250kms to Mt Isa, collecting an obscene amount of red dirt along the way (through our now unsealed van walls etc).

We saw very little of Mt Isa sadly, as we were in recovery mode, staying in a motel and doing our best to resurrect our goods from the van, have it assessed, planning the way forward etc. The children were fantastic through this whole ordeal, helping out when asked and for the remainder occupying themselves beautifully with what they had. They really pulled together for one another at this time. Reflecting on it they squabbled very little through these first few days after the accident, probably sensing their need to keep the sibling peace.

With the purchase of a trailer and the news that we would be paid out for our poor van, the journey continued across the outback, south to Tennant Creek and now we are here in Alice Springs (a massive 1,200km’s across 2 days!!). The landscape was pretty monotonus on these days and petrol hit a $2.10/lt high at the Barkly Roadhouse. Here we are all delighting in our reunion with Tim’s parents, are still dusting ourselves and everything off and are now awaiting the arrival of our new van from Sydney… Kate’s parents have very generously assisted in helping to get the van to us, with next to no notice. (Towing the new van hundreds of kms!).

We have been still staying in motels (shifting our gear from one to the next). The last few days we have been very fortunate to be staying in a two bedroom unit that Tim’s company has in Alice for its out-of-town workers. The space has been so welcome (and the Jason recliners, washing machine, bath etc haven’t been bad either!).

So far the red centre of the country has been very unique. Extremely dry, red, rocky and rather interesting. None of us have lived alongside so many Aboriginals before, and are quite fascinated by their culture and communities. We attended the annual ‘Beanie Festival’ with displays of a vast array of beanies of all sorts, handmade by locals and from around the world. Live music and community celebration gave us a bit more of a feel of this town. It was really quite fun! We have visited the Olive Pink Botanical Gardens and enjoyed great coffees there. The kids have handled snakes and lizards at the reptile centre. It has been wonderful catching up with some old friends from Sydney days who now live in Alice with their three little children. We enjoyed a fabulous barbeque dinner at Rainbow Valley (1hr, 15min) south of Alice, watching an incredible sunset on the rainbow escarpment. The star gazing was the best yet….with the Milky Way clearly evident.

Tonight we have just finally got the kids into bed (9.15pm) after much excitement watching fireworks from every window. It is Territory Day in N.T. and residents are free to buy and set off their own fireworks. We were treated to a fabulous spectacle with huge fireworks very close. At one point we had to hurry the kids under cover as firework shrapnel was falling onto the patio. The event bought back childhood memories for Tim and I and it was certainly a real highlight for the kids.

Off To Uluru in the new van in a couple of days….Yippee!!

Normanton and Lawn Hill National Park QLD (June - 4 days)

After a night in small-town Georgetown and a visit to ‘Terrestrial’ (an amazing gem and crystal display from around the world) we headed to Normanton for two nights. Here we felt truly outnumbered, being the only young family at the caravan park (or so it appeared!). We were put next to a very grumpy and intolerant older couple who looked quite distressed when we pulled up with four young children. We tried to be polite and smile etc…but they were stony faced. The only communication came when the husband very gruffly informed me that our mobile phone had been ringing while we were cooling off at the pool. We then went to the small local library to escape the heat and do some schoolwork, but were clearly not completely welcome here either! At night the frogs and toads were out and the kids had loads of fun spotting them with torches. It was a different story when the kids wanted to use the porta-potti at night and could hear the frogs rustling through the dried leaves at the back of the van!

We thought we would bypass Kurumba as we couldn’t tee up any accommodation and didn’t want to face the midges again so soon. So we headed further west to Adel’s Grove, our base camp for visiting Lawn Hill National Park. Here at the Grove the man at the check-in desk laughed at Tim’s genuine request for a grassy site. The whole campground was just dirt and leaf litter, but there was good shade and it was really quite peaceful. Harrison delighted in the camp fire we had next to our site, collecting wood for it, lighting it and stoking it endlessly. We all enjoyed charred marshmallows and the warm glow of the fire at night.

We spent a day and a half walking through Lawn Hill National Park, canoeing down it’s breathtaking gorge and swimming in a lovely billabong (where we kept one eye out for freshwater crocs). The colours of the red escarpment, yellow savannah grasses, smooth white gums and splashes of green were a stark and amazing combination. We visited ‘Wild Dog Dreaming’ a sacred Aboriginal site (that we were not permitted to photograph) where we looked at remnants of Aboriginal camps and very old artworks on the rock formations. The kids found it hard to appreciate the significance of this site at first, a little disappointed that the ‘artwork’ did not resemble in any way the precise and brightly coloured dot paintings they were familiar with. Canoeing the gorge was eerily quiet, especially for Kate (as the children opted for Daddy to escort them on their ‘turn’). It was magical being dwarfed by the sheer red walls of the gorge and hearing only the native birds and the gentle lap of water under the paddle.