We have escaped the cave after having a dose of COVID and doing the isolation thing. It is off down south to the Murray River, Australia’s longest river at 2,508 km and interestingly, it is navigable for almost 2000 km making it the third longest navigable river in the world; after the Amazon and Nile. Allthego has long thought that it would be an adventure to follow the river from near its source in the Snowy Mountains to where it empties into the sea in South Australia.

So, we are off with the van in tow making our way down the Newell Highway, after heading west from Brisbane through Warwick and Goondiwindi. This is the usual path we follow when going south through central NSW stopping first at a great free camp spot in Inglewood, followed by the John Oxley Caravan Park in Coonabarabran and then the free camp beside the lake at Forbes. Inglewood has an excellent bakery, great bread rolls and a selection of inspiring pastries. On this occasion we had to try their custard tart, it looked very tempting. We are going to test out some other bakeries on this journey and see if their custard tarts are as good as the Inglewood one was. It seems that in Australia we follow the English tradition of custard tarts, the base being a baked egg custard in a crust pastry topped with nutmeg. The Portuguese claim to make a great custard tart but theirs is housed in puff pastry topped with cinnamon, haven’t come across one of these.

After leaving Inglewood we stopped to have a look at the silo art installation at Yelarbon, about 50 km from Goondiwindi. We were last by this way about three years ago and only four (or was it five?) of the silos had been completed, now all eight are done and it is quite an impressive panorama representing the surrounding region.

Down in Forbes we are beside the Forbes Lake in the free camp along with a number of other vans of all shapes and sizes. It is a pretty spot with the sun going down throwing up a colourful sunset, last time we were here we looked across the lake at a huge dust storm. It turned out that Leanne’s brother Stuart and his wife Maree were in town visiting Maree’s father Bob. All three joined us for a short happy hour as the sun started to go down. Nearly three years since we had last seen them.

We are now heading off down to Grenfell for a couple of nights, never been there before. Bob wasn’t sure we needed two nights there to see things.