Our Family Trips: Day 3 - The Real Adventure Begins - Uluru

Hello everyone :)

Well we left Uluru at about 8:30am this morning, we had planned for 8 but somethings just never work out.

We woke at about 6am as the school tour group were packing up to leave, by the time we got up at 6:30am it was spitting rain again so we got breakfast out of the way and started packing up before it got any worse, making sure of course that we had hot coffee in the thermos!

Checked the road reports on the way out of the resort on the way to the fuel station and all roads were still open, great news :)

$2.185 per litre at the rock for diesel first ouch for the trip, but expected thanks to a passer by in Alice the night before departing who gave us the heads up.

Driving out toward the WA turn off and it was so cloudy and misty that you couldn't even see the outline of The Rock or the Olga's, so we didn't get any last photos - next time.

We hit the dirt immediately from the turn off to WA, pulled up to let air out of the tyres and headed on our way down the Docker River Road (or known also as Great Central Road) - The first part of the road was so smooth and from what we could see only just recently graded, after we had both said how nice the road was, the rough part started.... However still not as bad as the Finke (Maryvale) Road on the Finke long weekend after ever bugger has been out there.

11am came around and we found the rest stop that also is the tourist attraction "Lasseter's Cave" We pulled in for a look (photos below) it was definitely worth the stop.

We arrived at the WA border and the start of the Great Central Road at 11:30am, stopped and took some photos of course! then kept on truckin'. The WA side is as every one has said SOOO much better than the NT side, smooth, well graded and maintained and a really easy drive. Unfortunately no matter how hard we tried to be positive toward the NT road, comparison clearly showed in WA's favour.

One thing we did notice was the huge amount of dead, burnt out, rusted old cars that are scattered everywhere on the road side on the GCR.. If we had of known there were going to be so many we would have counted but by the time we released the large amount of them we were too far in. I think however if we were to have the end tally it would be not far from 100.

Arrived in Warburton about an hour ago now. Set up camp on a lovely grassed site, for $12 pp/ per night it is a very nice camp ground. Not much else to report on, seems to be a busy little place though.

After refuelling this morning and manually calculating fuel usage as opposed to using trip gauge, fuel usage was found to be much better than first thought and also discovered sitting on 80 or 90km/h instead of 100km/h fuel figures are even better again.

Back onto the dirt first thing tomorrow morning and will arrive in Laverton about the same time tomorrow afternoon. No doubt with more stories to tell.

Until then, check out the photos and will update everyone tomorrow :)

Rhianna and Anthony.