We set off on Tuesday the 30th of June from our free camp to Alice Springs. We stopped at Tennant Creek for short time. Another outback town where the streets are lined with indigenous people sitting around in groups, under trees and not doing a lot. Although not confronting, we certainly didn't feel comfortable there. We moved on and arrived in Alice Springs at around 11:00am and checked into the G'day Mate Caravan Park. We decided to have a quiet afternoon and not do too much.

The following morning we headed to the National Road Transport Hall of Fame. This is a massive museum dedicated to the road transport industry. It features over 200 trucks and road trains, the Shell Rimula Wall of Fame (tribute to Australia's trucking pioneers), Kenworth Dealer Museum (11,000 sq ft of new and restored Kenworth prime movers), books, souvenirs and just cool stuff like old petrol station equipment. It's a big boy's toys place and I thoroughly enjoyed spending several hours going through it. The girls, not so much. I later found Mandy buying time in the play ground with the kids waiting for me to finish looking around. Anyway I particularly liked a fully restored 1976 Kenworth prime mover. The restoration was as good as it gets and the prime mover for some reason really appealed to me. After lunch we had a look around Alice Springs. We visited Anzac Hill lookout which gave a great overview of Alice Springs. We were actually quite surprised at how small Alice Springs is. I were expecting a rural city about the size of Ballarat, however it only has a population of around 25,000.

The 1st of July in the NT is Territory Day. It's one day a year the public can buy fire works and set them off to celebrate being Territorians. It was really weird for us. We were in the shopping centre and the police were manning the bottle shop as they do in the NT. But right next door in a temporary fireworks shop (not manned by police) people were walking out with bags full of fireworks. That night we were in the caravan park and just on dusk the fireworks started. The park put on a show which was really good. After that fireworks echoed across the city constantly until midnight. I had to laugh the next day when I read "fireworks night celebrations - only 18 hospitalised'. The following day we set off from Alice Springs early to make our way to Uluru. Our plan was to catch up with friends from Beaufort and spend a few days doing the tourist attractions.