Day 2 - from Darwin to Kakadu: today started in the same way as yesterday. At 00:50 Olivia woke up and so did we. Tough as we are, we did not get up this time and pretended to be a sleep... For about 30 minutes and then went to her to get her to sleep again. That worked after an hour or so and then I fell asleep again. Hanne didn't. Jetlag (in combination with stress about the motorhome) kept her awake all night. So she "woke up" at 8 am with the words: "Can we stay here for another day? Seriously, can we?" Loving partner that I am, I said "no".

So, today was an exciting day for us but less for you readers. Exciting for us because we had our first encounter with what will be our own little road train the coming 8 days: our motorhome is HUGE! 1 compartment for driving, 1 for our bed, 1 for Olivia's bed incl play couch, 1 for bathroom/toilet and then we still have the kitchen area and the dining table! In other words, Hanne's stress of being cramped into a small area turned out to be needless. My stress however of actually driving the monstertruck was a bit more justified. About 8 meters long (a truck driver's license, anyone?), driver sitting on the right side of the vehicle, driving on the left of the road and Hanne in the driving seat (she gets car-sick when not driving). My stress was justified. Hanne is a great driver (she reads and corrects this blog before I can post it) but has a tendency of losing focus a little and drifting to the left, where I see the boardwalk or cliff coming very close each time. Most used words of the holiday so far: "naar rechts!", together with "mama vliegtuig".

Anyway, so today was a travel day: packing from our hotel, going to pick up our motorhome, going shopping for food for the coming days, eating in Darwin and then driving the 3 hours (300km) to Jabiru, center of Kakadu. Bit of a boring ride but we saw our first real road trains! A road train = a truck with (as far as we have seen) up to 4 consecutive "opleggers". So basically 4 big trucks in belgium connected to only one driver.

We had a few animal encounters: a very big bird that unfortunately hit our monstertruck - RIP :-( - and our first little kangaroo (or wallaby, we cant tell the difference) in the wild! Also a lot of nice birds at the viewpoint over the Mamakula billabong (in Kakadu). Quite an amazing sight although a bit scary to walk with Olivia through the woods to a billabong in crocodile-infested Kakadu. No worries, grandparents, the viewpoint was elevated so no access for crocs.

So we are now sitting in the nice Kakadu lodge and campsite on our first "powered site" and just succesfully unpacked, cooked, did the dishes, emptied the waste water tank, refilled the fresh water tank and powered our motorhome. We feel like real campers now, in a 4-star motorhome :-)

Olivia update: all is going well. She is getting excellent at math and her English is improving fast. She started playing piano and is reading along in the Lonely Planet. Uhm, no. She is the same as when we left, no worries grandparents! She is having a blast though. She sleeps, eats, drinks, plays and laughs. All of it a lot, except the sleeping around 1 am.

Tomorrow is a big day in Kakadu: ancient rockpaintings, waterfalls, viewpoints over billabongs and perhaps a boat tour!

Ciao mates!