Our plan of a quick dash round Alice Springs to refuel was stopped dead. We were now facing a significantly longer time back here. The breakdown trucked parked the van up at the back of the hotel we’d previously stayed at before taking Tinfish off to Toyota. Typically it was a Friday so nothing was going to happen to the car until Monday. We were fortunate that there were 3 other families camped up, 9 kids in total, which made it fun for all! Having completed site seeing at all the major Alice attractions on our previous visit, we did get in a bit of a groove with school work and cycled to the library daily. On Monday afternoons they held a Lego club, which all the children, young and old, enjoyed.
Lego fun! 
Studious
With so many kids, they found their partners and off they went to play. Big kids played with little kids, boys and girls and girls and boys paired off, interchanging partners on a regular basis depending on what games looked fun, and all got together to ride bikes around the camp. Who needs site seeing?! One afternoon we took our two and our new friend Oscar to the desert park in search of animals. It wasn’t really my highlight of Alice, but the kids seemed to have fun running around. The bonus to this little trip was Lucy (Oscar’s mum) looked after our 2 over another lunch time so Alex and I got date #2 of the trip. 😊
Kids games 
Dessert Park 
Where is it? 
Lunch date
Our original plan had been to go remote for a few weeks, so Lexi was delighted that we were stuck in Alice for her 9th birthday. The kids had a surprise party for her where we got pizzas, crisps and sweets in to gorge on before one of the families left. As a treat for us, Alex organised with the breakdown company to get an apartment for 4 days over her actual birthday, which allowed Lexi to bake and decorate her own birthday cake (of which I completely forgot to take a piccie of)!! We had an afternoon of birthday painting pottery and we also managed to entertain one night and had Lucy, Rama and Oscar over for the evening which was lovely and rather novel! We made the most of the oven baking cookies, sour dough and a roast dinner.
SURPRISE! 
Lexi turns 9 
The official day 🙂 
Friends for dinner
I also had the first “me day” of the trip, not bad, 10 months in. While Rama and Alex took the 3 children to fly Rama’s remote-controlled plane at the airfield, Lucy and I snuck off to a women’s convention as the casino. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It ended up being a relaxed and fun day out with Lucy with a bit of yoga, a Thermomix demo, pole dancing and coffee drinking thrown in! We ended up being in Alice just shy of 2 weeks in the end before the car was ready. Not sure which was the lowest point, car breaking down or England losing to South Africa in the final of the world cup! Alex was a very unhappy bunny that night!
Flying high 
Off we go
With the family all reunited again, we’d decided to do a quicker trip of the remote one we’d previously planned to get us to Adelaide for our house sit in 9 days time. First stop was Lamberts Centre, the geographical centre of Australia – another milestone for the trip – named after Dr. Bruce Lambert, one of the country’s top cartographers. It was to be just an over-nighter before heading down the Oodnadatta track south towards Lake Eyre. After taking the obligatory pictures, Reo piped up, “what’s that liquid dripping out of Tinfish?” Erm….good question, not sure!
Initially we presumed it was just condensation dripping from the A/C so moved the car to where we wanted to park up for the night before Alex investigated further. When we realised it was in fact pink fluid dripping out, we knew we were in trouble! Back on to the satellite phone to James, our first response team to ask him to google potential issues. Transpires it was engine coolant dribbling down just before the rear wheel… a little odd..!?! Turns out there is a heater in the rear, serviced by the engine coolant and the pipe had cracked emptying said engine coolant onto the ground. Now engine coolant is quite an important element to prevent the engine from overheating and ultimately seizing, so a dilemma to face in literally the middle of Aus..!
We set up camp, then hurriedly packed away again when Alex thought we needed to get out of there pronto, then re-set up camped again after he worked out a way to by-pass the rear pipes and prevent further coolant loss. We were more than a little peeved having only just got Tinfish back to have yet another breakdown. We’ve had some impressive breakdowns in the past and I think this would sit in the top 3, with the most memorable still whilst on the way to Mt. Everest base camp on our last road trip!
The following day was high stress as we limped our way back to the nearest roadhouse over 200km away, stopping periodically as we slipped over soft sand and the engine temperature topping 122 deg C. We’d put in some water to top up the coolant, but it was basically filtered bore water, so higher salt content, so not great for the engine and when we eventually reached the roadhouse, we added another 5 litres of ionised water to refill what we’d lost earlier. We’d been driving with 1/3 less than what we needed. We now needed to re-evaluate our plan again.
Since Alex had by-passed the issue, he felt it would be OK and maybe we could continue towards the Oodnadatta track. I must have had my sensible head on that day, as I erred on the side of caution and really just wanted to get down to Adelaide to get the car seen to. We’d managed to limp ourselves out of trouble, re-entering the wilderness would be another really difficult recovery if anything else went wrong and you never know if there’s been further damage with potential to cause problems until it’s been checked out by the garage. We decided to continue south on the main road just in case, the bonus of this being we got to wave to all the passengers on the Ghan Railway as it passed us.
The one stop that was still easy to make was Coober Pedy, an underground world beneath the dry, red dirt of the Outback. It’s a quirky, wild place with a few quirky, wild people. We stayed 3 days to give us time to explore and we managed to catch up again for an evening with Lucy, Rama and Oscar who left Alice a couple of days before us. You can only fully experience Coober Pedy by living the way the locals live, so we booked ourselves into an underground apartment for a couple of nights.
The kids loved exploring initially, amazed that all the rooms had been dug out with big drills, but at bedtime when all was quiet and pitch black, they got a little “freaked out” as Reo likes to say, when the air vents whistled and whirled and Reo’s imagination went into overdrive. As it’s Australia’s opal capital, a mine tour is a must here. Coober Pedy produces 95% of the world’s commercial opal and we had fun fossicking for the stone, found a couple of gems yet most of the rocks we found were Potch, which is opal with the fiery colour, and worthless! The 2 mine tours we did were really interesting, one a self-tour, one with a guide. We learnt how opals were formed, about the 15-year-old boy who discovered surface opal while searching for firewood during an unsuccessful gold expedition back in 1915, as well as how they mine the sparkly stuff.
The miners 
underground 
living 
Sparkly 
hunting treasure
We took a drive to The Breakaways to check out the sweeping views and take in the little details like the plants and the glittering pieces of gypsum in the soil. To get there we followed The Dingo Fence, which stetches 5,600km across more than half of Australia, a real marvel of scale that is only possible in a few places in the world. It’s aim, to keep dingoes out of the part of the country where most of the farmland is located. This particular section of the fence crosses the Moon Plains, a barren, desolate, flat and somewhat bleak panorama. You could be forgiven for thinking that you had somehow left this earth and entered some strange, parallel existence with a bizarre lunar like landscape. The whole area being so unusual has been used as the background and set for many movies including Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Pitch Black and The Red Planet.
Lunar Landscape
A trip to Coober Pedy is not complete without a visit to Crocodile Harry’s nest and dugout, with its cacophonous collection of bones, primitive art, messages from visitors and ladies underwear! The titular Captain was actually a crocodile hunter before settling down in Coober Pedy. He was a notorious personality in the town, well known for both his insane home and for his love of women. Alex and I visited his home in 1995 and met him, he was quite a character. He sadly died in 2006, in the end claiming he was in fact a Latvian Baron who had been in hiding since WWII.
It was a fun stay, made more so in the fact we knew that was the last tourist stop for us before getting to Adelaide and understanding what work needed to be done on Tinfish. Ridiculously, one of the pipes that needed replacing on the car had to be shipped from Japan, which would take a month – WHAT THE!??!!
As we were driving south, the weather was getting hotter again, we’d had some cooler days in Alice, think low 30’s, which had been a nice respite. We had a farm stay planned so we could organise ourselves before our big trip overseas to the UK, and we needed to drop Minty off there before heading to Adelaide to get the car seen to. The forecast was 46deg with the fire risk registering at ‘catastrophic’, so Roger (the farmer) had reasonably asked we stay away for a day. It’s hard to describe the heat if you’ve never experienced these high temperatures, it is very stifling, the heat hits you like opening a hot oven door and your eyes actually burn from the heat. We hid ourselves away in the library for the whole day reading books and completing school work and when we were kicked out of there, we took ourselves to the local swimming pool, along with hundreds of others who had the same idea! 7pm came and we were kicked out of the pool, so we made our way back to Minty in wait for the forecasted Southerly to blow in. Unfortunately, it didn’t arrive until 6am, it was a sticky night’s sleep. You certainly noticed the drop in 25 degrees and we were back in fleeces as 21 deg now felt cold!
After dropping Minty off at the farm in readiness for the farm stay a few days later, we headed into the Big Smoke of Adelaide. Breakdown cover kicked in again and we got an apartment in the city for 3 nights while we understood the implications of the damage on Tinfish. It was quite nice to be back in an apartment and we relaxed in the comfort of being in the city, coffee shops, pedicures, Christmas decorations, wandering around Rundle Mall listening to some very talented artists on their instruments and trying to buy Christmas pressies for the kids without them seeing – a lot more difficult that it appears!
It was time to go remote and up to our farm stay in the Adelaide Hills to look after dogs, goats & chickens. We’d arranged to accompany Roger to ‘Carols In The Bush’ where 5 of his children played the Bells, apparently an old English tradition, and they sounded fantastic. The Adelaide police band were the stars of the show and played all the Christmas favourites getting the festive feeling under way earlier than normal. They had a whip round for 2 charities close to their hearts and raised $2000.
On the way back to the farm, some cows had escaped from the paddock and the family managed to get them all back to their respective places – thankfully we weren’t responsible for the cows while the family were away. The following morning, Roger and his son Alex were taking us through our responsibilities when one of the goats was struggling to come for its feed, it had broken its leg. Alex returned with Roger from the vet looking a little shell-shocked, there was nothing that could be done, the goat ended with a bullet to its head! A lot had happened in less than 24hours and the family hadn’t even left yet, surely not much else could go wrong?!
We said our goodbyes and settled into our country life. I’d taken over the lounge with suitcases we’d borrowed from James and Tammy to get organised for our upcoming trip to the UK. I’d been buying gifts for everyone along the way and now had a pile of stuff I’d completely forgotten buying, duplicating on some and even quadrupling on one particular book for the cousins, looks like I’d got Christmas covered after all! It was great to have the place to pack our stuff and the kids loved being on the farm, especially Reo who would wander off for hours exploring and playing. As we had lots of down time, we ensured we did a bit of school work every day. On day 3 we started a novel way for maths…. “So Reo, if we let out 13 chickens in the morning and a fox eats 8, how many will return in the evening?”!! There were all sorts of schooling opportunities on the farm and this certainly was the kids biggest life lesson to date on natural selection! Thankfully the rest of the stay was uneventful.
We then ventured a little down the valley to friends we’d met on the road in WA who were staying on family’s land and they kindly let us join them. When in the wine region it would be rude not to sample a few, and Susie and Sue know the area well and you couldn’t have asked for better guides. Compared to the first time I went wine tasting in the Adelaide Hills (20 plus years ago!) it was comparatively tame, and of course it’s a totally different experience with children. Susie was great as she took Lexi and Reo off to look at different things as Sue, Alex and I sampled the flavours and bought a couple of bottles for good measure :-p Thanks for such a fun day ladies!
It was time for our last leg of Adelaide and we headed to James and Tammy’s pad again for a few nights of catch ups. With a year’s worth of dirt and grime, we decided a car detail was needed and the result was incredible! Like a brand-new car – nearly. With Minty dropped off at her holiday spa for 6 weeks at Drew’s place in the Hills (my old boss of 25 years ago) and Tinfish back to Toyota to wait for the parts to fix her, we were free agents! Bags packed, taxi booked, a lovely burger tea before saying farewell to James, Tammy, Henry and Charlotte and it was off to the airport. Even though Alex hadn’t flown for work in a year, and disgracefully lost his Qantas Platinum status, he had still managed to keep his Gold, so we swanned off into the business lounge for GnT’s, Bloody Mary’s, juice and a few nibbles ready for the 24 hours of travel back to the UK. Cccccccoooolllllddddd, here we come!
