MONDAY 3 APRIL   HALLS GAP TO SWAN HILL   315 kms

Once we were heading out of Halls Gap, discussed our options for today. If the Truck repair was done quickly, we did not really want to dawdle away the rest of the day in Birchip, so decided to try to press on and maybe make Swan Hill for the night.

After leaving Halls Gap, stopped briefly in Stawell, so John could buy a cable for his laptop, to replace the one he’d realized  he left at home!

We were in Birchip by 1pm.

The freight truck with the new pump did not arrive until 3.15pm!

We filled in the time with a couple of tasks. I went to the Post Office and sent off a little jumper I had just finished knitting for son’s coming baby.

Refuelled Truck – $1.37cpl. Had done 446kms.

My watch had stopped working. This trip really had not begun well!

We talked with W, while waiting for the part to arrive. He told us that the water in O’s house at Pungalina had reached five foot deep. It was no longer liveable-in. O had phoned him a couple of days previous, from Borroloola – where the lady friend was working. W said that the owner of the place, A, wanted to fly W up there to work on the flooded machinery and get everything going again. But O reckoned he could do that himself. We all speculated that things up there were worse than O had let on, and that perhaps he just wanted to try to sort it all out himself. We wondered what had happened to the boats, which would have been brought back to the house area, from their places on the river, at the end of last year’s season. Or at least we presumed they had. I wondered if the wheeled container that normally held all the Safari Camp stuff through the Wet, had been parked above flood level? I hoped so, after all the work I had put in last year, to get the place properly equipped.

Once the part arrived, W was pretty fast with the repair, so we decided to stick to our plan to try for Swan Hill. The vehicle work cost us $400. Nothing to do with Landrovers is ever cheap!

It was dark when we reached Swan Hill. Booked in to the Pioneer City Caravan Park – $27 after discount.