The Telegraph Station, Alice's Spring and some gaps and chasms

Sorry, it's been a few days since my last confession...er, blog. We've been busy - well the kids have - I've been swimming in ennui searching for a purpose and occasionally finding one. There seems to be a lot of lip service paid to the doctor - not a lot of reliability. I should get pretty good at Sudoku by the end! At the end of the day Friday I caught up with the Parker-Mitchell team at the Telegraph station where I heard all about the amazing station and it's continuous single copper wire stretching from Darwin to Adelaide. Far more amazing was the fact that someone was employed to sit with headphones on, listening to morse code all day - and I thought I had it tough! The kids had discovered water tables down at the spring and were keen to dig holes in the sand wherever it appeared dry to show me they could find water - seemed like a never-ending kind of game! We eventually extracted them from the springbed and headed into town to a place called the Bluegrass Restaurant which I'd found online and was touted as one of the best restaurants in Alice - my antennae should've gone up immediately. It was in this lovely old heritage building but if it was a fine restaurant before, it had fallen by the wayside lately. The tables were covered with red plastic tablecloths and the walls looked like they could've used another coat of paint or two - perhaps that's the look they were after? The promise of interesting tasting food was instilled by the menu selections but the follow through was lacking - seems to have fallen into the deep-fried trap so many Australian restaurants seem to gravitate towards.

Yesterday, Aidan woke up and out of the blue said he wanted to get into his schoolwork - we were flabbergasted as it was Saturday morning! Cole wasn't as keen but a few hours were spent getting some work done. We needed to get some passport photos and wanted to browse through one of the big aboriginal galleries (and grab a proper coffee!) so we headed down to the Todd mall walking street in town. From there we wanted to get to the Stanley Chasm, 50kms out of town. Again - it's a sacred area of one of the local aboriginal communities, open to the public . You hike in about 10 minutes from the information booth to a stretch of about 25 metres of  20 metre tall vertical rock on either side about 10 metres apart. The sun shines down the chasm for only 15 minutes a day and we managed to catch it at the right time. The kids had a ball checking out the isolated pools of water left over from some recent rains and enjoyed clambering over all the rocks and creeks on the way in and out. We'd made it there without having checked the fuel gauge before we departed and rather than heading further away from Alice to some of the other waterholes/gorges we had to head back. On the way, we stopped in at the Simpson Gap, only a few kms out of town. It's where a couple of small ranges come together at a steep valley leaving a 'gap' between the rocks - hence the name. At this time, there was a nice little collection of water between the gap in the rock, shallow enough at spots to take a wander in and across. It was incredibly scenic and very tempting to grab some ropes, a harness and some climbing shoes to scale some of the walls. The rock looks like it would come apart as you reached up to grab the next hold but - at least lower down - is actually solid and smooth without any real jaggedness. It looks like the ground has been split and angled upwards with a series of layered rocks split and cracked in perpendicular fashion, jutting in and out up the rock. You can see the different layers of rock pancaked one on top of the other rising out of the earth on a 45 degree angle with parallel seams - it looks ancient and spectacular. With the rising heat and the temptation of water, we ventured in to the local pool and cooled ourselves off for a few hours. The Alice Springs Triathlon Club had advertised a sprint and olympic distance tri for the AM so I mentally signed myself up. Back home though, I checked my mountain bike and found both tires flat - seems an inadvertant run through a bindi-patch had paid its due. As Jen got into making sushi for dinner, Piper and I attacked the tires. I managed to find a spare and some patches but the glue in the patch kit had all dried up and I needed two or three other patches. A quick trip to the Mobil for some glue and we were back on track. I set my alarm for the wee hours this AM, woke and checked my tires for success and found the front one to have softened overnight - so alas - it wasn't meant to be. I feel a little slack not having a go - will have to get prepared for the next opportunity - like maybe doing a bit of fitness!