We wake to a text from our friends Peter and Teresa telling us that they've been watching a news report saying that we, yes, Issy and me, have brought COVID to Darwin. We're not quite sure why squads of heavily armed guards haven't broken down our door yet. Issy rings Teresa in a panic. It seems that Peter saw something on the TV about COVID fragments in the local wastewater and thought it might be amusing to give us a scare. If we weren't properly awake before we certainly are now. I start planning an appropriate level of revenge. Letting down the tyres on his van wouldn't seem to be even close to cutting it.... We head off to the Darwin Military Museum out at East Point. There's a heavy emphasis here on the World War ... read more

We're still keeping a very nervous eye on the list of COVID exposure sites back home. I wonder what‘ll happen if anywhere we’ve been to does pop up on the list. I’m starting to have nightmarish visions of squads of heavily armed guards breaking down our door and carting us off to the local Howard Springs quarantine facility. I then make the mistake of Googling “Howard Springs” to find out a bit more about what we're in for if we do end up there. It doesn't sound all that appealing. We're not allowed to take any grog there with us for starters, so there go any plans we might have had for spending the two weeks in a drunken haze. I know my imagination might be starting to play tricks on me, but if the aerial ... read more

Today we head home. First stop this morning is the Murtoa Stick Shed. We read that until the outbreak of World War 2 Australia typically exported around sixty percent of its wheat to Great Britain and Western Europe. The War thus caused a glut, and the Stick Shed was thrown up in only four months in late 1941 and early 1942 to store some of the excess. We watch a short video presentation before entering the structure. It’s jaw-droppingly massive - 265 metres long, 60 metres wide, and nearly twenty metres high at its highest point. The roof is supported entirely by 560 slender mountain ash poles, which are thought to have been salvaged from Victoria's infamous 1939 bushfires. According to the ever reliable Wikipedia it’s often claimed to be the largest “rustically built” structure on ... read more

Today we’ve got a long day of driving to Renmark in the South Australian Riverland, near the Victorian border. As we check out we get chatting to Rob, my pilot from yesterday. He says that today he’ll be flying a group of intrepid expeditioners up to the not so thriving metropolis of Leigh Creek and then on to a picnic on the shores of Lake Eyre. One of the other guests in reception seems to think that Leigh Creek’s major claim to fame is as a landing ground for space junk. I hope Rob gets all his passengers back here safely. I’m not sure you’d feel all that well if a random piece of some Russian rocket smashed into you while you weren’t looking. There seem to be lots of dead kangaroos on the side of ... read more

Today we’ve booked for the so-called “Time Travel” tour, which is being led again by the very entertaining Mick, our indigenous guide from last evening’s Stokes Hill sunset tour. We’re not quite sure why it’s called the Time Travel tour, and are now thinking that we probably should have thought to ask when we booked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our transport isn’t something out of “Back to the Future“, it just looks like the bus we were on last night. Mick explains that we’ll be heading north from Wilpena Pound and then turning west onto the Brachina Gorge Geological Trail. The “Time Travel” tour title is apparently a reference to the journey we’ll be taking through 130 million years of geological time in little more than about ten kilometres of road distance. First stop is an inspection of ... read more