We'd had another very cold night. When we left Glen Helen after brekky the weather was very overcast. We first of all had to drive back to Alice Springs which took about an hour and a half. It was so cold when we left that we had the heating on full blast in the van! 'The Alice' when we arrived was very busy today because of the Desert Race and we only just managed to get a space in the car park. We went to Woolworths to stock up and then we headed out of Alice on the Stuart Highway in the northerly direction of Darwin and the Top End. A road sign indicated that Darwin was only 1442 kilometres away. We covered about 300 of those kilometres today. Not too far away from Alice the cloud started to lift and gaps of blue started to appear. By the time we got to our destination at the Wycliffe Well Roadhouse the heating was off and the air conditioning was now on. It was hot and sticky here and is probably going to get much hotter as we get further north. Wycliffe Well is known as the UFO centre of Australia and the Roadhouse and the attached caravan park have embraced a very quirky UFO and alien theme. The petrol forecourt, reception and caravan park is adorned with UFO stuff everywhere, even the amenities are labelled maliens and femaliens. We checked in and found a spot and then went to explore. There is a restaurant inside the roadhouse and the walls are covered with newspaper and magazine articles from around the world on UFO sightings. Round the back of the roadhouse there were some emus and a lot of birds in cages. Apparently they take in and look after sick and injured birds and we hope this is the case as we hate to see birds kept prisoner in cages when they should be free to soar in the sky. There was a galah in one of the cages and it flew right up to the side of the cage to see us. It must have been lonely and in need of some love as it put it's head right up to the side and let us stroke it's head feathers. It was so sweet. Later we sat at the back of the camper having a cold refreshing beer and looked at the sky for UFO's. Whilst doing this we got talking to the Australian couple who were in the big camper next to us. They were Marlene and Jim from Perth and they were lovely to talk to. They were from doing a tour of the top end. It didn't cool down tonight and we needed the fan on when we went to sleep. What a difference 300 kilometres north makes. It was a bit of a nervous night though, what with this being the UFO centre and all these stories of alien abduction. We hoped to hell that the smell might keep the aliens away as we'd not changed our knickers for a few days!

***** It is said that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand that go to make up all of the worlds beaches. Most stars are thought to be ringed by planets, in the same way the Sun (Earth’s star) is ringed by the 9 commonly known planets. These are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. In turn these planets are orbited by a Moon or Moons. The Sun is just one star amongst a hundred Billion that go to make up our Galaxy called the Milky Way, which is a relatively small Galaxy, when compared to the Andromeda Galaxy which is estimated to be made up of 300 Billion stars, with each star potentially orbited by an indeterminate number of planets. The Universe in turn, is in itself made up of untold trillions of Galaxies. Therefore, anyone arrogant enough to believe that our small planet is the only planet capable of sustaining life forms far more advanced than us, really can't be that bright! *******

****The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one they said...........