We had a lovely final Friday night pizza night at Douglas Daly and then on Saturday bid farewell to all the lovely staff there and also Pete, Michael and Sea.  We also had the perfect end to our stay on Friday with the news that WA had reclassified NT to very low risk and so we were good to cross over without having to do 14 days isolation.

We'd a nice easy run down to Katherine and out to Manbulloo.  We were last there at the beginning of June and it looked like a different place this time - it was absolutely packed to the rafters.  I reckon there was over 200 vans there every night we were there.  I'd originally booked for 6 nights there but with the news that we could cross the border with no restrictions we changed it to just three.  We spent several hours on Saturday and then a couple more on Sunday trying to get our new phones up and running.  It would have been relatively easy with a decent wifi signal but we were using the free town wifi and its pretty patchy.  But we were at least comfortable sitting in the Information Centre.  We booked an afternoon cruise for Sunday on Katherine Gorge so I'd packed a picnic lunch and after we'd got everything set up on the phones we headed out to Nitmiluk National Park and enjoyed our lunch there before boarding our cruise at 2pm.  It was fantastic as you can see from the photos - and what a difference the better camera has made to the quality of our pics.

Sunday night we'd tea back at the van and an early night as the car was booked in for a service the next morning.  We took it in to Katherine at 7.30am and got a taxi back to the park.  It was a good chance to get ourselves organised for WA and to get a load of washing done and change the sheets and get them done too.  The car was ready around 1.30pm so got a taxi back into town and picked it up - did a bottle shop run for some beer then back to camp where we did a bit of preliminary packing up.

We knew from both Ken and Susie and John and Carol that Timber Creek CP is really busy.  They don't take bookings so its first in best dressed.  We made sure we were up and organised early and managed to get on the road by 8.30am which got us here to Timber Creek just before midday.  We're jammed in like sardines but it doesn't matter for one night then tomorrow we head to Kununurra to cross into WA and then on to Wyndham for a couple of nights where we'll catch up with John and Carol again.

Its been a beautiful drive there through soaring red escarpments - have tried to capture it on a couple of photos.