151. Day 98 – We made it to “Sink a Tinny Downs” in Alice Springs

Friday 1 August 2008

We woke to another magnificent clear sunny day with a cool temperature of 65° Fahrenheit (18° Celsius).

After showering and a quick breakfast we drove back to the Stuart Highway over the ghastly rough and corrugated Ernest Giles Road.

We noticed a number of the Telstra Optical Cable repeaters that run from Adelaide to Darwin had their solar panels mounted up high on poles.  We can only assume that they were like this to stop the panels being stolen.

We stopped at the Cannonball Memorial in memory of the four people killed in an accident in 1994 competing in the Cannonball Run, before the Northern Territory had a speed limit.  One of the competitor’s cars was driven too fast and ploughed into two of the officials, causing a terrible tragedy.

We crossed the dry sandy river bed of the Hugh River then pulled into Stuarts Well Roadhouse. We enjoyed a delicious Aussie milkshake and had a good look at all the photos and stories on the walls of the roadhouse.

The traffic was constant along the Stuart Highway and every now and then we passed a road train.

At 11.00 am we reached the outskirts of Alice Springs and found our way to “Sink a Tinny Downs”, the home of our dear friends Nerys Evans and Ted Egan.

We parked in front of the house beside Ted’s Landcruiser, you can see in the photo just how much bigger our Earthroamer is.

Ted was in Darwin and Nerys gave us her usual warm and friendly welcome and invited us to stay.  We had reached another destination on our drive around the world.

As we drove over the corrugations yesterday, Pip had heard the microwave oven rattling badly in the back.  She climbed through into the Earthroamer and managed to push a couple of folded maps into the spaces under the microwave.  When we stopped we tied some rope from the pantry doorhandle across one corner of the microwave onto the coat hooks on the wall, to help keep the microwave in place for the remainder of the drive to Alice Springs.

Dick spent the afternoon working in the Earthroamer removing the refrigerator from its mountings, then taking the microwave oven out.  He found that the four legs on the microwave oven had only been held in place with plastic feet, glued to the base of the oven, then screwed from these onto the shelf.  The plastic had broken off and the screws had ‘eaten’ out holes in the thin metal, making it impossible to put the microwave oven back as it was originally.

We decided not to use the microwave for the rest of the journey, and felt that the best place for the oven to sit while travelling was back in the ‘cupboard’ made especially for it.  Dick managed to put the oven back on the shelf using one of the small rugs we had bought in Mongolia.  He folded it and put it under the oven to help absorb the vibrations when travelling, then jammed the oven into one corner and held it in place by screwing a few extra pieces of wood at the back and on one side before screwing the front panel of timber back in across the front.  We hope this will hold until we get the Earthroamer back to Denver.  He then put the refrigerator back into place and turned it back on – it worked!!

Total today 145 kms  36,863 kms since Anchorage, Alaska.

Amazing! Have a look at Spidertracks at the start of the day if you expand on Google Earth you can see the vehicle parked slightly to the west of the Henbury Meteorite Craters, then if you look at the last Spidertrack of the day you can see us parked at Ted Egan’s and Nerys Evans’ house “Sink A Tinny Downs”, just north of Alice Springs airport.  It shows the location vehicle within metres. 

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