Tuesday 15th July 2014

We woke up at 5 am and got showered and dressed and ate breakfast ready for our pick up at 6:30. Our tour guide, Derek, from Groovy Grape came and picked us up. We had short drive round to pick up the remaining passengers before we were off on the road to our first stop of the tour, Wilmington.

The majority of people fell asleep, so did we. It's hard to stay awake when you are travelling the long distances that we were about to insure. I'm glad we decided died to do a tour rather than drive it ourselves!!

We had a mini European Union on our bus, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, British, Italian. We also had Chinese and an Aussie! We drove past a few pink lakes which are salt lakes which the harvest in the summer, one had loch Ness monster in it, made out of tyres!

We stopped to go food shopping, I have never seen someone buy so much food! Three trolleys worth! we had two giant eskys full of fruit and the other with naughty snacks. these were. conveniently put at the back of the bus with us!!!

We drove through the Flinders ranges which were named after Matthew Flinders. The Flinders Ranges are the largest mountain range in South Australia, which starts approximately 366 km (227 miles) north of Adelaide. The discontinuous ranges stretch for over 430 km (270 miles) from Port Pirie to Lake Callabonna.

Our journey from Adelaide to Darwin we will be driving on the Stuart Highway, it is one of Australia's major highways. It runs from Darwin, NT, in the north, via Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, to Port Augusta, SA, in the south, a distance of 2,834 km (1,761 miles). Its northern and southern extremities are segments of Australia's Highway 1. The principal north-south route through the central interior of mainland Australia, the highway is often referred to simply as "The Track".

The highway is named after Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart, who was the first European to cross Australia from south to north. The highway approximates the route Stuart took.

Stuart led the first successful expedition to traverse the Australian mainland from south to north and return, and the first to do so from a starting point in South Australia, achieving this despite poor backing from the Government of South Australia. His experience and the care he showed for his team ensured he never lost a man, despite the harshness of the country he encountered.

The explorations of Stuart eventually resulted in the Australian Overland Telegraph Line being built and the main route from Port Augusta to Darwin being established.

It wasn't long after our drive through Flinders ranges that we arrived at our camp for the night at Wilmington. we made ourselves a chicken sandwich before we headed off to Alligator Gorge which is within the Mount Remarkable Ranges. Apparently it looks like alligator from above, I'll have to take their word for it! It was extremely wet so we couldn't do the usual walk through the gorge unfortunately. The gorge was on a fault line, so the rocks look like giant red/orange building blocks.

We got back to camp after our short drive from alligator gorge. we helped Derek cook dinner for the night and we sat down and enjoyed dinner while we got to know each other, before helping clean up.

We shared our cabin with two girls from the UK, sisters Megan and Rachel. we noticed there was an extra unwanted guest a baby (still pretty big) huntsman spider, Stu being the only guy had the job of getting rid of it! he is getting braver with spiders!

We managed to last the night without any other visits from the furry eight-legged kind, thank god!