All that packing, carefully weighing on the bathroom scales … get to the airport and I'm over the tour limit. Panic! (Never mind what it means about my weight!!)
Good trip to Alice. Picked up the hire car and decided to check in at the motel first. Room not ready but when I come back I only have to pick up the key, all the paperwork is done, right? Wrong! Two hours or so later, someone else had been given my room and my booking transferred to 1st September!! They didn't handle my booking well (chopped off a day when their house was full for a conference, different place to now) when I was in Alice in May. Must be something about the Alice. Took a while to get sorted. I got a room upgrade. Why can't it be flight upgrades?! I didn't need two queen size beds and the larger rooms front a very busy (read 'noisy') road, unlike the cheaper rooms. Ho hum. The silence of the desert tonight :-)
The only thing I wanted to do in my brief stop here was to get to Emily and Jessie gaps in the East Macs, which I did. Pretty places but not as spectacular as the gaps, gorges and chasms of the West Macs.
Phoned the tour company. My "bit overweight" luggage will be OK. Whew!!
The tour bus is parked here – the motel I'm staying at is the one the tour company uses. I can see they're doing last minute preparations. I met the tour guide briefly and found out it's a full complement of 26 passengers. That means, in spite of paying a single supplement, and someone else paying a single supplement!!, I'm not going to get a window seat all the time, and neither are they. Such is the life of a solo traveller. As long as I don't have an aisle seat next to a human mountain that I can't see past.
The tour starts for me in less than 1.5 hours. Final pack done, check out done (with almost as much difficulty as checking in so I got free breakfast this time), returned the car, looked in at the library (very well used, lots of customers in) on my way back to the pick-up point.
Hey ho and off we go!!
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| Jessie Gap, Alice Springs |