18/6/14 – Another cool night, it’s the wind that is the killer, without that it wouldn’t be so bad. The only sound we heard last night was a few dingoes.
We were up well before the sun, early breaky waiting for the sun to light up the rocks. On the road by 8.30am Qld time, since we will only be in NT for a few days no point changing clocks, it’s still dark at 7am. We turned left when we came out of the reserve, which would see us doing a loop and joining back up onto the Binns Track and up round to Old Mac Donald Downs (farm).
The last 96kms of the Plenty Hwy is bitumen.
Once off the Plenty we headed into Alice Springs to have lunch, fill up fuel and drinking water and go on the net and send off some posts. Can’t say we like Alice, filling up with water was not an easy task. We found out that you either need to fill up at a van park or at a servo as there are no taps. We happen to pick the Shell servo on the way out of town that only had one diesel pump and the only tap to fill up water was at that same pump. Rather ridiculous but we got there in the end.
Make sure everything is locked up at your vehicles and don’t leave them too long if it can be avoided. I had to pop into Coles and Chris stayed at the Ute. 2 local kids came and checked the ute and trailer out looking like they were up to no good. They didn’t know Chris was watching them in the rear vision camera. Once they saw him they took off like a bat out of hell. It was so nice to be back out of town and starting down the Tanami Track
We stopped for the night approx 123km from Alice at Charlie Creek Rest Area. It’s a big flat area, some trees, nice vista, has bins, shelter and tables, some gravel which was a nice change from red dust. One other traveler was there. An very interesting man traveling alone in his home made off road caravan. Lots of amazing stories and tales to tell. He could talk the hind leg off a donkey. It was nice to sit and chat, admire the million of stars and not have that chilly wind for a change.
