Day Twenty Two - Saturday 11th May – The Coorong to Horseshoe Bend Campground, Dimboola On the home run….

We woke up to see our lovely view had disappeared in a thick fog. Everything felt damp but not because of rain. Once we packed up and headed down the dirt road to Keith there was no lightening of the fog for many kilometres. Fog and signs warning about kangaroos is not a good combination, so we had to concentrate. I did spy a couple of kangaroos but fortunately they were headed away from the road. Then it was back on the Highway, with a noticeable change in the quality of the roads when we reached Victoria! The highway was quite bumpy and in need of some work. We did have a few drops of rain but not enough to worry us.

Once we crossed the border, we came to a small town called Kaniva. It had a beautifully painted silo, delightful wetlands walk and some outrageously painted sheep.

They even had an aviary with two magnificent red-tailed black cockatoos and some brightly-coloured regent parrots. Liz heard what she thought was me saying Hello! but it was a cockatoo who had clearly been domesticated. There was also a native animal enclosure with kangaroos, including an albino kangaroo, and some emus (I’m not so sure about enclosing the animals to be honest! Especially when you could see them in the wild nearby).

We were headed to Dimboola for the night and ended up at the Horseshoe Creek Campground. Some decades ago, when Lauren was small, we camped here, and we were completely rained out. My memory is that we decamped to the Dimboola Pub where the Grand Final was live on TV. I can’t remember who won but I didn’t care, we were out of the rain!! We’ve had no rain for the entire trip so we were confident that we wouldn’t have a repeat of that experience. The Campsites are right next to the Wimmera River so lots of magnificent old river gums lining the banks.

About an hour after we set up, it did rain, but not for long fortunately! Just enough to encourage Liz to put up the fly on her tent. She really hasn’t needed it elsewhere. We still had a large bag of firewood, so we now have a lovely campfire. Most places don’t allow you to roam around and scavenge firewood, so you have to buy bags. It can be quite expensive if you have them too frequently. But it is lovely to have one on our last night. Unfortunately, it is very cloudy, so the stars are covered up. One of our few neighbours has just asked if we could turn off our lights as the light was ruining his star-gazing. The bad news is that the amount of ambient light caused by our lights is not the problem: huge banks of clouds are obscuring the stars tonight. We turned the lights off to be cooperative of course, but it didn’t help at all. We’ll just be heading for home tomorrow so not very interesting. I’ll do a blog summarizing the trip when we’re home. But for now I have a glowing campfire to watch….. Your contented correspondent Dianne