Day Twenty Three - Sunday 12th April - Dimboola to Melbourne - A stick shed and several hundreds of kilometres....and home at last

Another cold foggy morning for us to pack up in, but first breakfast. So there I was, just about to enjoy my peanut butter toast, when a kookaburra flew in and sat on my plate gathering up my toast and flew away. I was astonished and he was very skilled as it all happened so fast!! He clearly didn't like Vegemite as he left that behind!

A couple of his friends joined him to devour my toast and a few magpies hung around to eat any crumbs. They're very brave and clearly have perfected their ability to steal food! After more toast (which I guarded closely!) we packed up and left, heading for home but with a couple of diversions along the way. The first was a visit to the Stick Shed in Murtoa. Last time Ewan and I were in the area we arrived too late to see it. So this time we arrived early. It truly is an amzing structure originally bulit in 1942 to store grain from the surrounding wheatfields as the markets had dried up because of the war. There were two other larger Stick sheds built in the arae but only this one remains.

It is a remarkable structure basically made of huge gum tree logs from the Otways and further afield, and galvanised iron roofing. It was built in only 4 months as the need for vastly increased grain storage was urgent. After the war, with increased storage on many properties, it became derelict. There was a move to pull it down, as the one next to it had been, but there was local interest in restoring it and many years of hard work and money has resulted in it being maintained almost in it's original state. The length of the tree logs holding it up is amazing and difficult to capture in a photo. From there it was a quick look at a silo in Murtoa and then one in Rupanyup.

It's looking a bit faded since the last time we saw it, but the portraits of two of the local sports players - a netballer and a footballer - remain just as beautiful. Based on real people you wonder where they are now. Then we raced down the highways, bypassing towns at a rapid rate, to get home in the mid-afternnoon. The end of such a wonderful trip , and the prospect of cleaning out the caravan, washing all of the clothes etc etc etc was saddening. I have a list of things we need to buy to make the caravan even more comfortable. Ewan has done an amazing job setting up solar panels and batteries and inverters (whatever they are!) so we had power even when we rough-camped so we had very little we needed. And we do have some wonderful memories and a better understanding of what it means to live in a country where distances are enormous and the desert is so challenging. Climate change will change the landscape even more so I'm glad to have seen it now. your satisfied correspondent Dianne