The day dawned exactly as promised; fine
and warm. My husband’s shorts were in such a state after long storage, I had to
drag the iron out from its hibernation and deal with the months of stubborn creases.
Again evidence of spring, and with that I spent a good part of the morning
sorting through bags and boxes of travel pamphlets and “souvenirs”; items one
just cannot hold onto travelling for such a long time and with so little
storage. It was my small effort at spring cleaning; a task I am saved of,
living this life, and one I have never been much given to.
We drove through Renmark and out to the
McCormack Centre promoted as having an
electronic interpretative model of the Murray-Darling Basin overlooking a
beautiful wetland area where native birdlife can be seen. Alas it was
closed so we returned to the shopping centre where Chris had his Telstra
cellphone topped up; he prefers they do it rather than us cursing and
struggling with the minute numbers on the faded bits of papers you otherwise
pay for to do yourself. We picked up some delicious bread from the supermarket as
well as the Weekend Australian, then
can home and sat about until lunchtime digesting one and then the other.
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| Looking back to the Paringa Bridge |
It was well after 1 pm we decided to do
something a little more energetic so headed off of foot for a walk, back across
the historic opening bridge then across the series of causeways over
floodplains and anabranches of the Murray River, passing the two Renmark caravan
parks, both much smarter than the one we are in and more like holiday resorts
than a stopover place. We crossed under the Sturt Highway and followed a
pathway through the bush lands that make up the Paringa Paddock reserve, the
path marked so poorly it was as if we had undertaken a challenging orienteering
course. Getting absolutely lost was an impossibility, because we could hear the
highway traffic in the distance and knew we had only to reach the river and
follow it upstream at worst. After carefully wading through overgrown ways,
here marked but not recently trodden, the regulars having given up on following
this as a proper walkway years ago, we reached Lock 5, the business end of the weir,
all barricaded off from the curious. Unlike the series of locks and weirs we
had visited in Mildura and on other places along the river last year when the
river levels were still so high from the recent floods, the water fell noisily
down over the weir, and when we finally made our way down to the lower edge of
the weir, we watched cormorants and pelicans busy fishing in the turbulent
waters.
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| Lock No 5 Weir |
Now thirsty, as one would be, having
set out in the heat of the day without water, I was anxious that we make our
way back as directly as possible, and with that in mind we walked back along
the access dirt road, turning at Chris’s direction on to another I thought
wrong. We found ourselves in a turn around beneath the highway however were
able to scramble up the bank and surprise the oncoming traffic as we seemed to
pop up from nowhere. It had taken us an hour and twenty minutes to walk from
the camp to the lock and took us about twenty five minutes to return.
It has been good to have a relatively
quiet day however we have a whole four weeks to fill between now and our sea crossing
to Tasmania. I shall have to do some careful planning for the intervening weeks
and the six weeks we intend to spend on that island state.
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