Beeline for Darwin!

We had a date...we had to be in Darwin on Thursday, 14th July, to pick up Daniel, Nicole, Isabelle, Mia and Jake at the airport! - for our "much looked forward to" family reunion. We hadn't seen these guys for 6 months apart from on Skype, so it was very exciting.

River crossing, safely traversed!

Beautiful country around the Gregory River

So once we left Lawn Hill, we decided to go the most direct and safest route to make sure we got there in time. The southern track through Riversleigh and on to Camoowheal meant only a couple of river crossings, not quite a few that were reported to be a bit "dodgy" in places and accompanied by many more kilometres of dirt road rather than bitumen.

No dirt road, but not a lot of excitement in the scenery along this section of the Barkly Highway

We stopped for a night at Barkly Homestead and a night at Daly Waters Pub Campground and then had a couple of nights to spare to pull up for a day or two at Katherine.

And so began the NT pub crawl.... they have some really unique ones!

Daly Water's Pub has a campground attached which we stayed in, great "barra and steak" meal and live entertainment most nights. We went for a drink, but as the entertainer could be heard 'well and truly' over the campground fence, we didn't figure we needed to stay for this!

the Pink Panther Pub, at Larrimah (just used the 'loo' here!)

 

Our campsite, poked in amongst the 1000's of others - not nearly as spacious as this photo looks.

We had time to pull in and have a dip at the Mataranka Thermal Pools - even better than I remembered it last time! Water that you could just plunge into and be delighted by it's warmth.