Our first camp breakfast! Making and eating our bacon and egg rolls with cups of coffees, we were yelling out with the pain of the cold in our fingers – and we were wearing gloves! Yep, it’s chilly.
We crossed the Murray River and are now in New South Wales, travelling on the Silver City Highway. We saw hundreds of black, white and brown feral goats jumping about happily by the side of the road and a wandering family of emus.
Emus eat different types of grasses, acacia, casuarina, ladybirds, crickets and beetles. They even eat stones to assist in their digestion. Out here there is already no mobile phone service.
In the middle of the mulga scrub and red dirt, the road is a black ribbon disappearing in the distance. You know you are out of the city when people in cars coming toward you, wave a friendly hello.
The landscape is just like a Pro Hart painting. We drove on our first dirt road today and saw a car bonnet on the road’s edge that looked like it had been picked up by a pair of giant hands, screwed up like a piece of paper and thrown on the ground.
Today we saw our first wedge-tailed eagle, our first big red kangaroo and the first road train of this journey.
We set up camp at Penrose Park, the caravan park in Silverton, outback NSW and checked out the Mad Max 2 Museum. It is owned and run by a husband and wife team who are hard core Mad Max fans. Linda told us a lot of information about the actors and crew and the film premieres they have been invited to. She told us to head to Mundi Mundi Lookout for sunset where there’s a dead straight bit of road that featured in the film. So we had a drink at sunset, a chat with some locals there while we were rugged up with coats and beanies. Then headed to the Silverton Hotel for dinner. We warmed up with chunky pea and ham soup and beer by the fire. Hanging from the ceiling are many signs saying things like: “I’ve got no luck with wives. The first one died and the second one didn’t.”
We all donated money to the Royal Flying Doctor’s Service by taking part in a pub game. Everyone in the pub was involved. We had to all stand in a line and balance a small potato on our head and tip it off our head and make it land in a funnel that was tucked in to the waistband of our jeans. Give it a go if you are ever in Silverton. It raises money for a good cause.
