Easter Miracles...

April 19-20

2,123 Clicks

Drove to Turkey Creek Roadhouse to camp for the night in preparation for our drive into the Bungle Bungles the next morning. We were befriended by this cattle dog who hung out at our campsite for most of the night. She immediately showed us her belly & whimpered til someone indulged her. Man, did she need a bath!

Easter morning...the Easter Bilby left something for everyone. He got creative when he couldn't find any baskets.  (You know how hard it is to keep chocolate eggs from melting in this heat??!? This bunny deserves some props!)

He even left some goodies for cousin Erin. 

The first miracle of the day was finding my missing boot. Not sure if you noticed in the boot pic, but there are only 3 matching pairs. Chris had his match in the truck, but after a thorough search, mine was missing.  I quickly remembered Chris driving to our site from the parking lot with one of the storage doors open. I was coming out of the bathroom & hollered at him to stop & closed the door so he could continue. (Mind you, there's a really annoying rage-inducing high pitch squeal that the Wombatmobile emits when the ignition is on & her doors are open.  He must not have heard that.)  I retraced his route & found one of my socks flattened into the dusty road and started to panic just a little bit because there was no boot with it. The miracle occurred when the maintenance man from the roadhouse was emptying the picnic area garbage & noticed it lying roadside... Major phew!! 

I'm not sure about the more urban areas of Australia, but entire towns are shut down for the 4 day Easter weekend. All the grocery stores we've passed have had reduced hours on Saturday/Monday & were completely closed on Friday/Sunday.  No big sales, no door busters going on, just closed doors. 

Second Easter miracle = roadside solanum!!

Great Northern Highway to Purnululu and our dashboard dryer system:

Below is the the gate to Purnululu (Bungle Bungles), a world heritage site. Little did we know, it was going to be a 90-minute, snakelike, really bumpy dirt road to get to our hike.  I've not been getting carsick thus far, but this ride was a killer (renamed our destination: Barfle Barfles, Puke-alulu).  I completely understand why people shell out the big bucks to fly over them, rather than ride in -- between the corrugations in the road that make the car seem as if every bolt is about to fall out & the "deeper than we thought" creek we went through. 4x4's paradise!!

  

Feeling sick, but more solanum!!!

Lunch was...you mighta guessed. Tuna. 

The entrance to Echidna Chasm.  Most of the palm trees are gone from this area.  The only ones remaining grow in sheltered coves or cliffs, relics of a formerly wet, tropical forest.

These rocks are 360 million years old.  Our landscape in PA is a baby in diapers compared to these naked mountains.