May 10 Back to Alice

We made our way back to Alice Springs and found a nice place to camp about 60km south of Alice - just opposite the turn-off to Owen Springs. We were the only campers with plenty of open space and set well back from the highway. All was well until dusk. Then the little buggers started to rustle in the long grass. Princess became even more energised and darted through the long grass on a mission. She got a taste for it the previous night when she made her second kill for the trip. She knew what she was after. As the darkness increased, so did the courage of the mice. They came out in pairs, then 3 or 4 of them together, scuttling about in random directions.

Armed with 2 mouse traps, I attended to my manly duties of protecting our home. I melted easter egg chocolate onto the traps, which made it harder for the mice to lick off without triggering the trap. Within an hour I had filled a plastic bag with 30 mouse corpses. After setting the traps, I could barely get back into the van and sit down before the "bang" of the trap going off could be heard. I would return to the battlefield, remove the victim and go through the cycle of setting the trap again. I could have kept going all night as there seemed to be an endless supply of reinforcements being sent from the wilderness on to our camp site. In the end, I'm not sure who actually won the battle.

Fortunately, we haven't had any mice in the caravan yet. If we had, then the trip would have been over and Judith would have returned home (although we're a bit worried about just how many mice will be living it up in our little Talbot home at the moment). But we do know that the mice can get into the car, despite locked windows and doors. We ensure that all food in the car is either locked tightly away in plastic storage containers or moved into the van for the night.

In the interests of any children who may ever look at this blog, I will not include a picture of the mass dead. However, I have had a request for more gore in the blog, more blood and guts. So here are a couple of mouse photos that will hopefully satisfy my brother Stuart.

Mouse trapped in the car over night

Ruby finding a dead mouse at a gorge

Dead mouse floating at the gorge

The mouse that Princess caught