Once in a while the universe smiles upon you, though sometimes it first poops on your head.  We’ve been having a lot of poop, but yesterday the sun shone through. That’s a badly mixed metaphor if I’ve ever seen one.

So now I’ve reeled you in with that, the last quick catch up I did we were heading into Darwin, we spent 6 days there and had a ball. The second part of the title belongs, in fact to Darwin and the Mindil Markets.  Bought a pair of fisherman’s pants there for $15 and I am sincerely regretting my decision not to buy more. Also saw jumping crocs, which were a-maz-ing and toured around town, visited the shopping centres (a bit novel) and had a great dinner out on the waterfront. Then headed out of town, spent another night at the beautiful Low Level Big 4 in Katherine, and headed off toward Alice Springs for a date with a rock.

This is where fortune stopped smiling upon us.  You may have read in earlier posts about tyre punctures, go back if you will and do a recount of how many tyres we have done… well not far out of Daly Waters number 4 went. Had a great night down at the pub there, and a fantastic feed – I highly recommend the bruschetta. On goes the UV damaged spare, but it’s ok there’s a Bridgestone in Tennant Creek, they’ll surely be able to help us, oh, and theres a Rodeo on over the weekend – great we’ll have something to do while we wait for Monday.

Monday comes. Into Bridgestone we go. We encounter the worst possible service (I don’t actually think that service should be included in that sentence but can’t think of an alternative) and not only does he not stock our size tyre “even if you got one in my machine can’t balance it”. Awesome, can he give us any further advice? No, he has already walked away. Then some other lovely blokes who had heard this exchange offered to see what they could do to help, which turned out to be tightening up the wheel bearings – that’s right, the same ones that went on in Karratha at a cost of $1350 weren’t done right – there’s value for money from guys charging $150 per hour for labour. Anyway that’s a whole other kettle of fish.  On the road to Alice, only 500k so maybe we can baby the car down there.

Travelling at a little under 70k per hour stopping every 100k or so, actually stopped at Barrow Creek for lunch which if you’re going by the pub is worth a look if you’d like to see Most Graffitied Bar in Australia (my bestowing of title there). But lo and behold a scant 15 minutes back on the road and… wait for it…

BOOM

Yup, that’s tyre number 5 you just heard, so what’re we going to do now?  If we had reception we could call for a tow, that’d only be a coupla grand. Hmm, no? ok, so we have thee trailer tyres, they’re 31’s and there are three of those, and the extra spare appears to be a 31 also, if only the guy we bought the car off were here so we could inquire as to that stupendous decision to not upgrade both spares when changing tyres. Anyway, three off the trailer, plus the extra spare, that’ll give us 4, and then we can run the grossly oversized car tyres on the trailer, but it’ll get us there – I guess. Oh, but wait a second, what’s this? A car pulling up to offer assistance, and on the other side of the road a 4by doing a u-turn to also attempt rendering of assistance.

Told you the universe smiles

And you didn’t believe me

But, just like the Ginsu Knife, wait and there’s more.

Not only did the wonderful fantastic Mark and his un-named wife stop to ask us if they could help – they lent us a wheel! That’s right, a shiny wheel that drove us all the rest of the way to Alice. Absolute lifesaving procedure, and hopefully the wheel of Karma repays their good deed.

Love lollipops rainbows and sunshine, may the wind always be at your back, and any other joyus attributes.