Long day of nothingness

(Thursday 19^th July)

 Today was the longest I’ve ever driving without seeing much of anything. We drove from 8am till 5.30 with only short breaks (four breaks of less than 20 minutes). During that time we saw only one town (Tennant Creek, pop. approximately 3,000) and hardly any houses or buildings of any description. It was amazing. The first little while was extremely flat and devoid of trees, then it became scrubby and remained so for the remainder of the day. Ed's note: we drove through an area called the Barkly Tableland which is the size of the U.K. or New Zealand and is home to some of the world's largest cattle properties.

I’m really tired now, but it wasn’t so much the long drive as the boys who accompanied us that have really done me in today. Yes, this is the fourth 700km+ day we’ve done since Friday, and surely that contributes to my fatigue. But we had one son “fall apart” this morning. It took a lot of work to try and sort out why he was sobbing and calm him down. When he does this to us, usually we send him to his room to calm down, but that was clearly impossible. It takes it out of me emotionally when we have such a struggle of wills. After he calmed down he was the opposite, very happy and giggly and the three of them drove us crazy, with loud hysterical laughter and various antics that continued on and off the rest of the day. Very tiring.

Then the last straw was when we pulled up at the caravan park at our destination “Ti Tree” and we found a nice site, but after unpacking chairs, BBQ, etc. realised that the site had electricity but no water. We moved it all to another one, did the same unpacking and found the electricity outlets didn’t work, so we moved to another site, that, thankfully did. But by this time it was getting close to 7pm and we were very frayed!

So now I’m not going to write anymore, just head for horizontal. Tomorrow we do the final leg to Uluru and will stop there for three nights. Ah, blessed rest.