Tuesday 3rd July - Darwin

Itinerary rescheduled

John was onto solving the car issue first thing today.  Kerry Nissan in Darwin were being most unhelpful so he ended up talking to the service manager at his usual place of service in Sydney who advised not to drive the car to Mt Isa [which was an option] as the diff could fail at any time.  Obviously for this to happen on a 500km drive in the middle of nowhere would not be a good thing.  Nissan Darwin claimed that they needed to strip the differential to take photo's of the damaged diff (a weeks delay) and then send an application to Nissan which would take another week, then order in the part from Sydney which would take another 2 weeks. John said this was unnaceptable and a stalemate ensued, which was resolved when John called Nissan head office and they approved the repair on the telephone. The car is now booked to be repaired on July 12th.

This left us in a bit of a dilemma as to what to do and in the end we decided to take the risk and drive to Kakadu on Friday, then come back to Darwin next week.

We rounded out this bad day by going bike riding in the Casuarina Coastal park and around the waterfront through Rapid Creek and Nightcliff.  About 5kms away from the car my bike got a puncture in the front wheel!  John rode back to the car, came and picked me up and we went looking for a bike shop to get it repaired.  We found a really helpful bikeshop.  The bicycle mechanic was very busy but said John was welcome to use their tools to make the repair!  We were soon fixed up.