Last Tuesday the 13th of November I decided to go for a little drive to see my parents . 4 days later I got there .
I wrote a little while ago about not being able to find anywhere for Chaos and Mayhem to spend Christmas. I called every boarding kennel in town only to be told there was no room ( already this was starting to take on a Christmassy theme !! ) . So my next option was to try to get them on the plane with me as baggage ( I wouldn’t tell them that to their faces though .. ) This was possible to do but not at the price they were going to charge me … so my last option was to drive me and the two poochies down to Albury NSW myself – in a 93 model Suzuki Swift hatchback.
Making the best of a not so ideal situation I entered us all in the Triple J / ABC Open Road Trip Relay which is taking place over summer Australia wide. Since I was driving through the middle of the Australian desert I had Queen of The Desert car stickers and T-shirts made up by an awesome company in Darwin called Gecko Signs (you can check out their website here ) .
The day before I left I was contacted by Triple J and ABC to talk about my trip and they asked me to film some legs of my journey and edit it with a thing called time-lapse ( I can turn a computer on , type and even Google stuff but that my friends is as tech savvy as Kel gets .. ). So Dave stuck the camera on the dashboard for me with Velcro and I recorded the Stuart Highway from Katherine onwards until I ran into technical difficulties just past Coober Pedy and had to abort the mission. So for anyone who is interested , I have hours of fascinating footage of road , sky and desert.
I did however get some great stuff from the random roadhouses on the side of the lonely old Stuart Highway :
Posing with my old mate .. see if you can find me !
I wrote about this particular pub months ago in this post . I mentioned at the time it has the highest bar in the Northern Territory .. here is my ‘proof’
The highest bar in the Northern Territory
A service station at Wycliffe Well , UFO capital of Australia ( I kid you not )
Wycliffe well .. UFO capital of Australia
And in Stuart Well I found Dinky the Singing dingo who is also a very talented piano player – I have a video clip for you guys but this will be posted separately – this K9 deserves his very own post !!
*The article is about Donna the ‘hearing’ guide dingo being brought up to the NT ( by train .. she had her own seat ! ) to meet Dinky , the singing dingo .
We couldn’t resist getting into the fun and games at the last pub ( or the first depending on which direction you are headed ! ) in the Northern Territory ( Kulgera Roadhouse/pub/caravan park ) …
Chaos , Mayhem and Kel
I also met a few interesting characters on the way including a chap from Coober Pedy who was actually involved in shooting ‘ Priscilla , Queen of The Desert years ago when it was filmed in the outback . He loved my car and we have kept in touch via Facebook since. I also interviewed a young fellow from Mataranka for the Road Trip relay comp but after interviewing him I’m not quite sure he actually was a local .. thoughts that were pretty much confirmed as I ran into them at nearly every petrol station after Mataranka until I hit Port Augusta in South Australia . Oh well at least he pretended on film which is the main thing 
* My ‘stalkers’ outside a Coober Pedy servo.
Unlike the last time I crossed the country when I had to sleep in my troopy on the side of the road , this time around I booked hotel and caravan park accommodation along the way . Again the highlight was Coober Pedy where I slept in an ‘ underground camp site ‘ which was really just a motel bed in a cave :
There was also little cave like spots for people to pitch a tent for the night .. underground .. yep made no bloody sense to me either but apparently that’s how they roll in the desert ..
I thought this particular tent was a display of what it was like in the old days so I was snapping away happily at 630am until I heard a loud cough from inside the tent .. woops …
And finally the last pic of this little motel tour , the front entrance to our digs
This was my last night in the desert before I crossed over to NSW and Victoria , spending my last night on the road in a little town called Broken Hill. It was a great trip and the dogs did a great job of not pissing me off too much .. Chaos has been all over Australia ( except Western Australia and Tasmania ) but this was little Mayhem’s first trip anywhere .. she was a natural ..
* Maisie finds her comfort zone in the car.
In between naps she would climb up behind the back seat and launch herself kamikaze style at Chaos’s head . It kept them amused …..
Until next time !!
Cheers
Kel xx
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Tags: adventure, animals, Australia, cars, Coober Pedy, Coober Pedy South Australia, desert car, entertainment, fun, humor, humour, Northern Territory, outback australia, Paranormal, Recreation, RoadTrip, South Australia, Stuart Highway, Suzuki Swift, swift hatchback, transportation, travel, Triple J, UFO, Unidentified flying object
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