Back in the land of electricity and internet!! We haven’t bothered much keeping track of the date recently- in fact we often don’t even know what day it is. Life is that good!
After Mataranka we headed into Katherine where we found a Woolworths oasis- absolutely wonderful for getting the assorted dietary needs of the family met. Nitmiluk NP is near Katherine and jointly managed with the traditional owners, as with most parks in the NT. The caravan park we stayed in was near the gorge. The kids all swam off the jetty even though I was only mildly comforted by the crocodile trap nearby and the signs assuring visitors that they did check at the start of the dry for sneaky salties. Our family was the only one swimming though. Hmm. Anyway, limbs intact we climbed up to the lookout for a sunset view of the gorge- absolutely gorge-ous. Arch and Jess simultaneously scraped their knees on the way down. We have gone through three boxes of bandaids in the first three weeks.

After two days of relative luxury (electricity and tap water)we camped at Leliyn, also in Nitmiluk. As we hadn’t settled in the one spot for more than 2 nights since Flinders we decided to stay at Leliyn for 5 nights. This gave us a more relaxed pace each day rather than packing up/ driving/ setting up.
Archie has decided now to collect diseased leaves rather than rocks or emu feathers.
Each morning, when it is still cool, we try to start the day with Bible devotions followed by the kids writing in their journals. Then we do a bit of schoolwork. We even did some on a Sunday, much to boys’ disgust (never mind that they’d done almost nothing over the previous week!). Arch is working on sentence structure at the moment, and reading. Isaac and Darcy are doing a basic overview of the history of Australia, and poetry. The older boys tend to do stuff with me while Greg works with the littles. Usually by about 9.30am it is too hot to concentrate. Once we took the kids down to the waterhole and did schoolwork there. This also involved (Darcy’s idea) doing times tables where a wrong answer results in the child getting pushed into the water. As it was so hot there were lots of wrong answers.
One evening we took the kids down to the waterfall to paint the sunlight hitting the rocks as it set. Another day we hiked up to the top falls.
Jess walked the whole way, which is a huge improvement for her. She was told that if she wanted to swim she’d have to walk there. Her legs sadly didn’t work on the walk back. Again there are warning signs about the possibility of salties, and the ranger told us there are 3 freshwater crocodiles living in the waterhole but they’d be fine if we just leave them alone. He said the biggest one was only one metre. Again, only somewhat reassured.
Being in an old-ish caravan with a slightly larger than average family means that lots of darling grey nomads, every day, several times a day, will give us advice, food, magazines, toys and reassuring comments. Archie also made friends with a little boy from Perth, and both boys had a very happy time playing with dirt and trucks, as little boys do.