Monthly Trip Summary (3)

Jan. 9 2011 – Feb.8 2011

Summary of the third month of our trip

Number of countries visited: 1 (still in Australia!)

Number of flights taken: 2

Number of posts added to our blog: 18

Number of marital conflicts: 0. Hard to believe, but nothing fits this category for this month... We must be getting boring as a couple :)

Best overnight stay: This is hard to pick: we spent many nights in beautiful places but it was so hot and the wind was so strong that they can hardly qualify as best overnight stay. Our pick is simply an overnight rest area on the road from the West Coast to Tom Price and Karijini Park. It was not too hot and not too windy and we were surrounded by intense colors: the ground was very red; the trees around had very white trunks; the sky around us was completely dark. And wherever we turned we could see spectacular lightening breaking the darkness. Beautiful spectacle.
And a bonus: I cannot recall seeing any dangerous (or dangerous looking) spiders there. I’m sure they were somewhere around, as they always are, but at least they didn’t stain my memories of this place!

Worst overnight stay: unfortunately it will have to be Exmouth. It was a beautiful camping almost directly on the beach but the temperature stayed well above 30 degrees for the whole night and the wind almost broke our tent. We had planned to stay there for two nights but after the first one we decided to head inland to look for a nice place to sleep in the dryer climate. And the fact that it was in Exmouth where I first encountered the red-back spider (see Marc’s post on the subject) definitely didn’t help!

Best Call we made: Deciding to rent a campervan for the trip between Adelaide and Darwin instead of camping in a tent. The rest of cyclone Yasi and the rainy season in the north would have made sleeping in a tent quite impossible.

Worst Call we made: Not staying longer in Adamooka and Coober Pedy. Had we known that parts of the national parks we had planned to visit were impassable due to Yasi, we would have definitely followed our hearts instead of sticking to the original plan…