Sunday, Jan 24, 2016 at 13:20
We're not
grey nomads (greying gently!!) so we only had 4-5 weeks. We pushed it to
Boulia in a few very big days because we've seen so much of everything in between.
Grey nomads would have a fit over those distances!!
The car did the trip superbly. Shook a radiator bracket a bit loose on the Gibb but that was it.
The shredded tyres were all on the trailer. The first one was the original and we did in on the Plenty.
We bought 3 new tyres for the trailer in Alice. Not sure what they were (and hubby's at work so I can't ask him at the moment) but we went on the tyre bloke's advice...hmph. We later learned that you must have decent side walls because the gravel they use on the roads is damn sharp!!
Funny, we'd done
Birdsville and all sorts of tracks in previous trips and neither of us had had a flat in 20 years...and yet on the
Kimberley trip we did 3....including our spare...I learned why hubby had always insisted on steel rims! We did a tyre at the end of the Gibb and no longer had a spare. We couldn't get a spare in Kununnurra so we opted to head for
Katherine to try there (we're on tar now...should be ok!!).
No. Bloody Murphy's Law.
We did our spare tyre in, about 40km from
Katherine at 4pm.
No spares left, no RACQ around the corner, and
well, we had "steelies" to get us out of pickles such as this.
Drove slowly on one good tyre and the flat/rim (pulling over when road trains appeared behind us-you could see their headlights from about 20km away on those straight roads!) and then, when the rim finally collapsed, we put the flat spare on again and did the last 20 km fwop-fwop-fwop-
fwop...!!
All up we did 4 and a bit weeks. We missed a few bits around the Gibb because of the dog but consider that we saw an amazing amount of things anyway. You'll have
grey nomads say that you need 3 months alone to do the
Kimberley but when you have to return to work and reality that's not on the cards!
Don't be put off by "how little time you have". Do bigger distances past the bits closer to
home and get out there to the more distant bits.
We've seen a lot of outback Qld so we high-tail it to the edges and then meander (on the way
home we did
Camooweal,
Augathella and
home...3 days, 2 nights. Love all the
places in the middle but been there, done them and work beckoned.)
If you've only got about a month or so, you may even consider heading up to the
Kimberley and doing the Uluru bit another time. I mean, from our corner of the world here, it's maybe 5 days across the Plenty to Alice...you could do it in a separate trip perhaps?
We did one night stops in about 2/3 of the
places, arriving a bit after lunch in most cases. The other 1/3 were 3 nighters (
Fitzroy River Lodge,
Home Valley Station, King Ash Bay,etc) So, we didn't see everything because of our time constraints and the dog, but it was better than staying
home!
By the sounds of it, your vehicle and trailer and experience are very much like us.
Get good advice on the tryes, add an extra spare and if you get to use your
puncture repair kit, good luck to ya!!
:)
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