Sunday 26 May. Mildura to Broken Hill

 After a big breakfast ( included in hotel room fee) we set off on the Silver City Highway. It would have been just after 10.00. I was delighted to see orange trees full of fruit but didn’t feel inclined to offer to help with the picking.

It was only about 30km to Wentworth where the Murray and Darling Rivers meet. There is a lovely park where you can see the conjunction of the rivers. We saw pelicans, galahs, cormorants, ducks, budgerigars and birds we don’t know. Must have spent an hour or more there. A few hundred metres on was Lock number 10 and a weir. This lock is only 30.8 metres above sea level.

Once we left Wentworth there were no more settlements until we reached Broken Hill. The landscape was mostly flat and scrubby. At one spot there was a lake in the distance. We did see a few crossroads and the occasional driveway and letterbox but no houses. There were a lot of dead kangaroos and a lot of living goats. We also saw two big trucks loaded with goats heading towards Mildura. The other wildlife was a wedgetailed eagle circling above something, maybe one of the baby goats and a couple of emus.

There were quite a few rest stops along the way and the one with toilets was a dud because they were both out of order. There was a strange winged sculpture nearby.

We arrived in Broken Hill about 3.00 and looked for a cafe that could give us a cuppa but the only one that looked open was actually closing and sent us away. We finally got a green tea and a brownie at the BHP - Broken Hill Pub. They had run out of coffee beans and had no ordinary tea bags, just green tea and Earl Grey. Sat on their terrace to have our cuppa and it was hot there. Renee was down to short sleeves and I had removed my jumper.

Our motel rooms are upstairs (bugger) but quite comfortable and this evening we could walk a couple of blocks to dinner at the Sturt Club. My advice to potential travellers is don’t arrive on a Sunday afternoon. Everything is closed. I got a shock to discover that my watch was half an hour different from the time on my phone but the booklet in the motel explained that Broken Hill is on South Australian time, so my watch hadn’t run mad after all.