Day 63 – Jabiru to Darwin (Mon June 25^th)

We left for Darwin today, where we are looking forward to spending a week. We had a campsite booked at the Shady Glen Tourist park for 3 nights, and then for the last 4 nights we have shouted ourselves a cabin.

We plan to do a general cleanup for the first few days, and also get the car serviced. Then we can have a relaxing break in the cabin for a few days before we leave Darwin and head for the West Coast.

Our first stop once leaving Jabiru was the Bark Hut Inn for a takeaway coffee. The Bark Hut Inn is an iconic Northern Territory pub with heaps of character. 

It’s about half way between Darwin and Kakadu, and has a caravan park out the back which looked pretty good.

http://www.barkhutinn.com.au/

We arrived in Darwin about lunch time, and after living here 9 years ago for 5 months, it felt a little weird to be back.  Everything looked the same, apart from some more housing estates and a new overpass near Palmerston.

We booked into the Shady Glen Tourist Park, which is the closet caravan park to the city centre. 

BUT, when we got to our allocated site, it was only suitable for a tent. The whole park was full, both unpowered and powered sites, so they tried to fit our camper in the car space in between 2 cabins! No thanks guys, we will go somewhere else. Grrrrr!! This was very frustrating, we will have to stay somewhere else and come back when we are ready to move into our cabin.

We rang Lee Point Caravan Park, and were told that there was plenty of room, so we headed out there. The caravan park is at the end of Lee Point Road, out near Lee Point Reserve. It’s nice out here, we remember bringing our dogs to the beach at Lee Point Reserve when we used to live here.

The caravan park is busy, and it’s huge! It’s old, but suited us great! We found some grass and shade and set up. Throughout the park are heaps of small amenity blocks, each with their own washing machine.  We had our own little amenity block right in front of us, which was very convenient with the kids and amount of washing I had to do.

We are close to the large Casuarina shopping centre, and also another smaller shopping centre with a Woollys. There is a water park for the kids just down the road from the smaller shopping centre, so we were very happy with our new location.

Unpowered sites are $40/night for 2 adults. We are in peak season now, with the school holidays. We really can’t get over how many caravans we’ve seen since we hit Katherine.

We spent the afternoon at Lee Point Reserve on the beach. Damon and I reminisced about old times in Darwin, and we all enjoyed our first Darwin Sunset.

It’s great to see the ocean! It’s been a while, the last time was about a month ago at Karumba in the Gulf.