Last night I woke about 5am to lightening and thunder followed by heavy rain - I lay in bed listening to the storms as they passed overhead - they lasted until about 7:30am. Hopefully the rain also fell on the farms with new crops planted.
Today we went to Balranald. Just to see the place. We drove up the Murray Valley Hwy. The area is mostly flat with just a few small hills - farming country with some vines and other unidentified crops. We turned off to Tooleybuk - a small town just over the river in NSW - a pretty little place where we stopped to take a few photos of the Murray River - more vines and citrus. As you go further north, the country becomes very scrubby with mallee gums (scrub) and red earth. In places there are no fences, and in other places, farm growing crops - not sure what, but they are getting up to 15cm or so. A few places had sheep with one or 2 properties of cattle. The landscape was gentle rolling small hills. No a lot of traffic, although the road trains do use this road to get from here to Sydney (turn east when reaching the Sturt Highway).
We turned left and crossed the Murrumbidgee once more to arrive in Balranald. We drove around the town, which is quite small, I went into a Collectables Shop, but found nothing to buy, and we found the old station, in a state of collapse, on the way out of town.
From there, we headed back south until we came to Kyalite where we headed east to Moulamein. This time very flat country, and the parts not irrigated looked pretty poor - some sheep, and some fodder crops. All the time, we could see a storm up ahead, and saw some lightning, but we didn't catch up with it.
In Moulamein, we found the Lake - lucky it had a sign. Unfortunately for the town, the lake is almost completely dry. We found lovely new picnic tables and were able to sit in the sun to have lunch. We drove around town a bit and also found the rail head - rice is shipped from here, if they ever have enough water to produce a crop again. This town is on the Edward River (same as Deniliquin).
Back to Swan Hill through flat country with some more Mallee scrub and some sheep. We passed several water courses and a couple of lakes, all dry - this country is in dire trouble if the rain does not come in large quantities real soon. In town we went to the Visitor Centre to find out where the Speedway is, in case Ted ever comes up here for a meeting, then we went out to check it out.
Back to the van, where I did some emails, and then had a problem being unable to log out from the Wireless Network service - so my money was ticking away when I did not want to use the internet, however I was impressed with they help desk who not only logged me out, but credited me some time as well.
Tonight will be beef casserole, which I hope will be very nice. It is raining lightly again, and there are lots of black clouds around. Back again soon.
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Balranald Hotels
