Horsham…………………….Day 201

12 Oct 2014

28 days left of roaming around Australia.

We have been camping out for 6 days and it time to come to a caravan park to do washing and charging up electronics, watch the Bathurst super 8 race and generally enjoy a little luxury of power so we can have lights on.

We left Nyah 4 days ago and headed westwards towards Mildura. We found our bush camp at Horseshoe Bend quite easily, just a few kms west of Mildura. How luck we were to find this beautiful spot right on the banks of the Murray River.

From Nyah we drove through Robinvale, crossed the Murray River into New South Wales and drove west to Barong. Here we crossed the Murray River back into Victoria into the city of Mildura.

Below is the view at dawn at Horseshoe Bend on the Murray River.

We spent Friday looking around Mildura, Red Cliffs to the south and then we crossed the river back into New South Wales to drive to Wentworth where the Darling River joins the Murray River.

The Darling River has come all the way from Queensland to here at Wentworth to flow into the Murray River at this point. The Darling River is to the left of the photo and the Murray River  is to the centre of the photo around the point of land.

Later this afternoon, a couple in another caravan joined us for Happy Hour. Soon a couple of others also joined us, including the couple in a fifth wheeler. We were all a bit puzzled when he parked his vehicle next to ours and rolled an electric cable down to where were sitting. Don then spent a couple of hours entertaining us with his keyboard and piano accordion. In the end we had 14 people at this impromptu concert.

On Saturday, a little reluctantly, we left this fantastic spot of paradise and turned the car southwards for Hopetoun. We stopped at Red Cliffs to look at “Big Lizzie”, a mechanical monster of a machine that was used in the 1920’s to helped the Returned Servicemen clear the blocks of land around red Cliffs. It was built in Richmond Victoria and moved at 1 mile per hour.

Then onwards to Hopetoun where we had planned to stay, but a school reunion and the local show caused caravans spots to be few. we decided to travel a further about another 104 kms to Horsham where we could watch the BIG Bathurst Race. We were all interested in some degree in this car race as only a couple of weeks earlier we all drove around this famous race track. Admittedly we were only able to do 40 to 50 kms along the track as it was being prepared for the race but we did enjoy watching the speeds of 250kms to 300kms the race drivers were doing where we had been.

I think we are going to Naracoorte in South Australia, tomorrow but as everyone knowa, things can change.