Darwin to Wongalara, and our new home

   The eighth leg: Darwin to Wongalara Sanctuary.  Distance: 616km.  A ute full of groceries, a bumpy ride, and reaching our final destination.  We left early in the morning to be able to finish up our shopping in Katherine, the closest town while we're out here (300km away from our house... but takes 5 and a half hours to get there).  Having gotten the dry goods in Darwin, we wheeled through the Katherine grocery store with reckless abandon, grabbing the perishable items that would round out our enormous grocery bill.  With town runs a couple times a month, you need to be prepared.  Food: check.  Alcohol: check.  We spent a few frantic moments trying to track down some parts for the generator that the sanctuary needed.  Being a Sunday, nothing was really open, but thanks to Tegan's persistance someone was roused that could unlock the gate and give us the package.  We didn't even have to part with one of our cases of beer as payment.
   Driving in our 2 utes, Tegan in the work vehicle and me in Frank, we got to our turnoff: the Central Arnhem Road.  If Katherine was our hub, this would be our interstate highway.  A dirt track that connects Arnhem Land (a huge lot of aboriginal land to the north and west) to the rest of the world.  Saying goodbye to the smooth bitumen, we hit the dirt and quickly found that it had gotten quite rough after the recent rains.  With shadows crossing the road and making it hard to see some of the washouts, there were some moments when I had to apologize to Frank for beating him so relentlessly.  We followed the signs for Wongalara, and finally arrived around 7:30pm.  Home.  After a little over a week on the road, totaling nearly 5000km, burning through diesel (and cash) at an alarming rate, and seeing some great sights, we made it.
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Coming up: what the hell are we doing?, where exactly are we?, and how can rats and cats take up 8 months of our lives?