Day 15 - A smoothish start to the day with a pretty good checkout time for us 9am - yeah! Matt still unimpressed but am sure we’ll get there eventually!
Driving to Kings Canyon we saw the same trees - Desert Oaks and Eucalypts but way more established and thicker scrub. Pretty impressive ridge lines came up on horizon as we got closer. Wish I had a pocket geologist to explain to us all the rock formations and their origins, best we can do is stare and wonder! Lunch in car park accompanied by some very sticky flies before setting off on the first leg of 500 steps straight up the side of the canyon?! Poor Stuey, (ok, and poor mummy) plodded up the steps, wasn’t too bad and once we were at the top that was pretty much it for the climbing. We finally crawled through Priscilla’s Crack and out onto the edge of the canyon where Stu was not allowed to let anyone’s hands go! Beautiful view, incredible rock formations around us, layer after layer of sandstone- Tommy’s observation that these rocks all have wrinkles. 6km around the canyon with a little dip down into a billabong (Garden of Eden) to give us an idea of what the floor of the canyon was like. I went over on ankle after 4km, tag teaming for injury of the day, all downhill after that though so not too bad.
In a massive weekend visiting these three magnificent rock formations I think I am now at saturation point for having my mind blown- and hope I can absorb everything properly to tuck it away and remember later- failing that we’ll just have to come back! Matt and I agree that next time we will be doing the deluxe fly in fly out to Uluru sans offspring and pay for all the tours, except Segway rides- just don’t think I will ever get there!
What should have been a few hours drive to Glen Helen Gorge turned into a 24 hour nightmare as we heard a thud into the bull dust about 80km into the Mereenie Loop. Our trailer wheel detached itself and rolled off into the scrub leaving us stranded with an hour of daylight left on a very isolated road.
Once we realised we were screwed (the bolts holding wheel had completely shorn off) we were able to calm down and jack up trailer best we could once it was off the road. We had to leave it there, complexly full as we weren’t that keen on spending the night in such isolation not knowing who was around while we had kids with us. So we drove another 2 hours to Glen Helen Gorge arriving about 9pm. We drove through some very rough patches and the brumbies on the road were similarly not appreciated! The staff at the Lodge were so kind, whipping up some dinner and giving us rooms at a cheap rate. We could tell they were thinking (as we were) that there was a good chance the trailer wouldn’t be in the same condition as we left it..... so we sank into bed exhausted, v worried about trailer but glad we hadn’t opted to stay out there.