Central Australia

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Days One and Two



5:00



After an early start, we drove down from Toowoomba and enjoyed breakfast in the Brisbane Airport Qantas Lounge...courtesy of our American Express Platinum Card. A nice perk! We flew through a lot of cloud so weren't able to enjoy a lot of the countryside. We arrived at Alice Springs in the rain, caught the shuttle to our hotel, walked across the bridge over the Todd River into town and collected our hire car. We spent the afternoon visiting the Alice Springs School of the Air. It was started over 60 years ago and has students as far away as 2000km. The Old Telegraph Station was our next stop and it was still raining. It opened in 1872 to relay messages between Darwin and Adelaide and is on the original site of the first European settlement in central Australia. It was one of twelve stations along the Overland Telegraph Line. When rain fell and ran off an unusual granite rock into a water hole inthe Todd River, opposite the Old Telegraph Station, it looked like a spring of water. This was named Alice's Spring in honour of the wife of Charles Todd, Superintendent of Telegraph, by surveyor, William Mills. Before it got dark, we went to the top of Apex Hill when the iconic photographs of Alice Springs are taken. Back at our hotel, the Chifley Alice Springs Resort, we were tired and a little water-logged so we settled in and had a nice room-service dinner.

On Day Two we had breakfast at the Botanic Gardens Café and then visited the Ghan Train and Rail Museum. After a last minute shop we handed our car in. Being a Sunday, the car rental office closed at 1 pm so we were not able to keep it any longer as we were leaving on our camping tour early the next morning. We did have one special treat... the Todd River was running!! Not everyone gets to see that. We had a relaxing afternoon, getting ready for our early departure, a late afternoon walk in sunshine and room-service dinner again!

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