Alice Springs & Lawn Hill Trip - Day 8

Day 8 - 9/6/2016 - Alice Springs

It was good to have another slow start to the morning.  To make up for the last week of travelling and also becuase once the Finke Desert Rally starts there will be a few early starts.

A few more transporters rolled in later that morning.

These are just small teams and there is still big money involved

It was also great to see some neighbours from the Hervey Bay region at home also making the trek across.

Looking through all of the registered competitors I found one entrant from Bundy.  So we were keeping an eye out for his race number over the weekend.

We met Jodie’s sister Lisa at the airport at 1pm.  Her flight from Sydney was delayed about an hour due to the strong headwinds the plane was flying into.  We helped her collect all of the luggage and load it into the hire car.  She had some big travel bags.  The boys were riding from Sydney on their motor bikes and loaded her up with spares in case they needed them by the time they reached Alice.

Not a bad view from their hotel room

After Lisa checked into the hotel and unloaded the bags, it was pretty much time to go and meet Ian, (Lisa’s husband), and Pieter, (Ian’s friend).  We had been stalking them via their SPOT tracker so we had a pretty good idea when they were going to reach the entrance to town.  We were planning on surprising them by meeting them at the entrance.

Unfortunately we didn’t quite get our timing right, missed them by just a few minutes.  They arrived just before us.

Arrival in Alice Springs

We though that we had been doing it tough by pushing out a cracking pace to get to Alice, but these boys had left a few days before us and were travelling a fair bet lighter than us.  They also had to deal with the rain and also strong headwinds.

After a quick round of hellos we all headed off back to the hotel to help the boys unload and settle in.  The boys unloaded their bikes and changed and then we all hit the Juicy Rump bar in Lasseters Hotel to celebrate everyone making it to Alice Springs safety.  The afternoon dragged on to evening and we ended up staying for dinner as well.  When we mentioned this one of the staff, we were met with a less than enthusiastic response.  Great to see that they were at the top of their customer service game on their most likely busiest week of the year, especially when they were a Platinum sponsor of the event!

After dinner on our way out we had a quick wanter through the Family Fun night that was setup in the Lasseters carpark.  They had a few of the bikes, cars and buggies on display.