On the weekend we celebrated my 41st b’day, an amazing feat and one that I am personally quite proud of.  I feel officially old enough to not give a stuff about what other people think, which gives me license to go into camping shops.

Lycra is not my friend so  I have been observing the middle aged adventure holiday maker and they have their own style of active wear which I never really noticed before.  Expensive camping gear is the older persons yoga outfit!!!  So to celebrate 41 years on the planet I took myself off to the camping shop, spent way to much on a polar fleece and a pair of high tech pants, and according to North Face apparently I am going to feel like a Goddess. So get stuffed Lorna Jane.

So feeling like a stylish middle aged Goddess I headed off to go on a camel ride.

I have seen pictures of people riding camels on Cable Beach in Broome and it looks amazing, the only real difference for my camel ride experience was we were not at Cable Beach we were in Alice Springs.

Doc our camel seemed mild mannered enough, I was slightly concerned about the nose cover…. not sure if he had a habit of spitting or biting but either way he couldn’t reach me once I was on his back.  He lumbered to his feet and we were off, with 12 others wandering in line through the red dirt towards the McDonnell Ranges that surround Alice Springs.

It was kind of relaxing, very much like sitting on the back of a fat horse.  The landscape is stunning, red escarpments, scrubby flat flood plains and a big bright sun slowly slipping behind the hill.  Our long shadows accompanied our slow plodding progress.  Some big red Kangaroo’s lazily hopped over the flood plain, it was a pretty iconic evening really.

I should have brought a hip flask, a little sip of Baileys would have gone down well.

I also identified a problem with the new pants track pants, the friction created between my high tech Goddess pants and the sheepskin on the back of the camel was creating quite a lot of heat!!!  Put it this way I was happy that it was only an hour sunset ride 🙂