Rather than dragging the caravan out the Gibb River Road, we decided on a day trip from Derby.

The journey began with a serendipitous Skype with Marsie in Sydney and Zane and Luka in Vancouver whilst packing up at the Bungles caravan park.  We didn't leave quite as soon as we would have liked but enjoyed the egress so much more!  
The drive itself was really quite spectacular prompting Dom to call out at one stage "It's the end of the world!" looking out to where the flat horizon met with the sky.  "If we kept driving we could fall off" Dom followed up with.  "And what would happen if we did?"  I wondered.  " We would be in space" came the obvious reply.
We enjoyed more great escarpment action, fat termite mounds and some actual green trees and grass.
We made good time to Fitzroy Crossing arriving at about lunch time and settled in to make good use of the power and water! Isaac is super keen to buy his own laptop at the moment so earnt a few dollars cleaning out the caravan bathroom and folding some of our three spectacularly big, and significantly less dirty, loads of washing!  One swim was required to settle the cabin fever in the evening and of course an episode of River Cottage Australia online, our latest addiction...

To the kids it is already becoming known as the place with the great toilets, but it was more than that...

It was a much less daunting hike into El Questro over the 16 km of unsealed roads after the 90 km or so of unsealed roads getting into Lawn Hill. We knew we could do it. We knew the van and the Land Rover could handle it also.  We packed better knowing without it we would have stuff rolling everywhere thoughout the van and the red dust is a given, we just clean it up at some stage or another…nothing we can do to prevent that one!

But we were pleasantly surprised. For a lot of our relatively short journey  we were directly behind a grader that had just laid down the red carpet for us to get into the station!

Western Australia!!!

Worth the trip in...just.

This was a place of great beauty, and it was stinkin' hot in the day time.

Our second time in Nitmiluk National Park, at rather more salubrious digs.

This time in Darwin, it was time to take it a little easier...

One of the "must do"s of Kakadu is Ubirr at sunset and we did it, Grandad being very pleased that he got to the tippytop!  Paul did it a bit stressed (that Dom may fall off or either parent may fall over!) and I did it with the same concerns only not weighing nearly so heavy on me, ie totally, tearily, blissfully.