Darwin.... for the last time

Friday 15 June

Well today was the day, will the car be ready or not? After breakfast, we headed straight to the mechanic’s workshop to see how things were. Josh was working on the doorhandle which looked promising as he couldn’t do that unless the gearbox was installed. YEA…. The gearbox was installed and he assured us we could pick the car up in about an hour or so. We left him to finish and headed to the shops to fill in time. I had to force myself of course! We filled in an hour or so and headed back to check the car. I stayed in the hire car while Brian went in to see how things were going, next thing, he’s back with our car key. This could only mean one thing, WOO HOO, our car was finally ready. Obviously the first thing to do was to return the hire car ASAP and take ours for a decent run to make sure all was ok before heading off tomorrow. A run along the coast and except for the odd hard change between first and second gear, all was fine. We assume that that will soften when the new gearbox wears in a bit. We are very relieved that we have the car again and on the way back to the van park, we dropped back in to Josh and gave him a carton of beer for all his efforts.

We found that Lynnette (Ross’ sister) and Ray, who we had run into in Alice, were in our van park here in Darwin. We wandered around til we found them, had a quick chat and made plans to meet up again for a drink after we had a swim. Armed with a bottle of champagne and some nibbles, we headed down about 5pm to have a good catch up with what they had been doing since we had last seen them. We spent a companionable few hours drinking and chatting and catching up. It was a lovely way to end our time here in Darwin.