Day 16
An early start for Matt and Tommy who completely emptied the car out and left to find trailer hopefully not in flames and intact! Lil, Cam,Stu and I guiltily enjoyed a breakfast at the lodge- it has the strangest European alpine decor in middle of outback yet it felt just right! If you just changed the bright orangey red colour of the mountains just across the river from the lodge to dark rocky outcrops with patches of snow, would be none the wiser! We spent the morning catching up on journals and some schoolwork to take minds of what had happened... had to do some serious bribing with hot chocolates and prospect of more chocolate after we were finished, but was a pretty productive morning with a stunning backdrop for our classroom today! Made a few calls to Alice, we’d been told only one place would tow from the Mereenie Loop - ‘Outback Vehicle Recovery’ and they were good enough to send a truck out pretty much straight away, best we could have hoped for although it cost a small fortune! The driver called in on the way and did his best to conceal that he thought we were just idiots from the city, actually he didn’t do a very good job with that, but I didn’t care by then, just wanted it sorted! The kids and I went exploring while we waited for Matt and Tom to get back with news of trailer. The Gorge was only 500m from the lodge but we still managed to get lost in the tall reeds on the way there, think any snakes had been well and truly warned of our approach and were safely absent!
We had a great time splashing about through the shallow water. Of course Stu managed to get himself saturated, but he is slowly learning that is just tough luck and he has to drip dry, so wasn’t too bad! Water was very cold, apparently you can swim across to other side of Gorge and walk another 15mins to some special rock formations, but mummy not up for any adventuring and we played about on shore until Matt and Tom turned up, I had been getting pretty worried something had gone wrong as there was no way of contacting them - of course they had left the sat phone behind?! Thankfully trailer completely intact, probably thanks to the fact it was a road used predominantly for the mines so no traffic on a Sunday afternoon when it happened, just tourists and miners who all stopped to help. The Cruiser was loaded to the hilt with everything from the trailer, they managed to save all the frozen meals I have ready for the next leg of our trip, fridges had stayed on all night- phew! Matt and Tom very tired and starving so we shouted ourselves to a nice feed at the lodge before setting off to Alice to book back into the Campground- only this time into a cabin. Matt then drove back out to Glen Helen Gorge for the second carload of gear to top off a huge day for him, he collapsed into bed around 8pm after 700km of driving and logistics, we all were quite happy to be back in Alice.