SUNDAY MAY 7     BOORT

It was a cold morning, with a biting wind.

Couey got her morning ball games, but no lake play – it was far too cold.

A gloomy day

When I made lunch, realized that John was very low on milk, so after eating we drove to the local supermarket, hoping it would be open, but fearing that, in a small country town, it would not. The sign on the closed door said they shut at 1pm, but the owner was still inside, at the cash register, finishing up with a customer. He saw me peering in and opened up for me. Lovely of him. That wouldn’t happen in the city!

Since we were out, John decided to keep driving, Headed to the east, towards Durham Ox. Weird name. My map – a tourist information one – showed a road we could use to do a round trip, alongside the Loddon River. When we came it, the surface was dirt and I was not prepared to gamble on it, having seen the heavily rutted state of some of the other area roads, after what must have been fairly recent heavy rains.

So we drove on to Durham Ox, which was basically just an intersection, turned around and retraced our way. On the approach back to town, John stopped  at a place that was having a clearing sale – he’d noted it on the way out. He went in to browse. I stayed in the car. He did not buy anything, which was wise given our lack of spare space. It was mostly farm related items anyway.

Next, we drove right around Little Boort Lake. There were some good looking, mostly modern, homes across the road from the lake, with good views over it. Clearly, the “best” part of town.

The main Boort Lake looked to have a lot of dead trees and reeds growing in it – not as attractive as the “little” one.

John wanted to look at the large silos we could see in the distance from the caravan park, so we drove in that direction, then kept on going on a dirt road as far as Woolshed Swamp, where the road became a bit boggy. Commonsense prevailed and he turned around and we went back.

Saw an interesting old brick structure in a paddock, near the railway line. A brick cylinder, with what looked like windows at intervals up it. I thought it might be a silage pit? From something we saw days later, seemed it was probably a water tower, presumably related to the railway, though that was a few hundred metres away. Maybe the rail route had changed?

Mysterious brick structure…Water Tower?

There was so much grain stockpiled around this district. The receiving area at Boort had numerous grain heaps, under the pale blue plastic sheeting.

When we got back to camp, I took Couey for a walk in the opposite direction to usual. The caravan park was partly wedged between the lake and an irrigation canal. We walked to where the canal exited from the lake, where there was a board-walked section through some swampy ground, and a footbridge over the canal. There was another Mens Shed metal sculpture in the canal mouth – a large dragonfly.

Saw a number of ducks swimming on the canal. Every day since arriving here, we’d heard gunshots at different times of the day, and from not too far away. At the same time, there had been no ducks on the lake, just coots, the occasional swamp hen and one shag. I’d assumed the shooting was duck hunting and hoped the ducks had all fled to somewhere safe. However, today I realized that there was a clay target shooting club nearby, and this was the source of the noise. I was pleased to have seen some ducks happily swimming.

The caravan park from across the lake

There were no other vans in this afternoon, This is the first time we had been alone here, in this part of the park.

Tea was fries and some blue grenadier fish I’d brought, frozen, from home.

Watched some TV.