Yo to you all again!

We in are in Bourke at the moment, and it's warm and sunny, but nottoo hot with
a nice cool breeze blowing through the caravan park. Haha to you poor Melbourneites,
stuck in your freezing houses shivering to retain the tiniest shred of warmth.
I am having a lovely time in these warm parts =P. It's weird! The only people out
in the outback who have wireless are the ones who are clever enough to put WPA
encoding on their connections, and so I haven't been able to connect to any.
My family stopped at the Crossways caravan Park in Mildura, because they had an ad
for wireless internet out the front. However when I turned on my laptop, it came up
with a really badly made website which told me in big friendly comic sans letters
that the internet was $10 per hour. Shocking horrible ripoff. I hate Mildura.

Anyway apart from this blow, the holiday has been fantastic so far. It was so cold
in Ballarat that it was snowing. Yes. Snowing. In Ballarat *shivers*. We had lunch
at our friend's house, the newly wed Mr and Mrs Deduegd (Pete and Genevieve) in
their house near Clunes, north of Ballarat. Thankfully it wasn't quite snowing there,
but still icily cold. Next stop was Maryborough,which as Mark Twain described as a
railway station with a town attachted. This is a fair observation, as Maryborough
railway station really is very massive. The weird thing though is that no trains
stop there anymore. We stayed that night in Charlton, with my dad's friend from
college. They had a rather big house, so we didn't set up the caravan that night.

The next day we drove to Mildura via lunch at Lake Tyrrell, a moonscape of sand.
That night we stayed at Crossways caravan park, which I mentioned. It sucked, because
of their stupid internet. Argh. The next day we spent in Mildura, shopping because
there wasn't much else to do there. Mildura is a very boring place. Possibly the
most interesting thing there was Lock 11, where the paddle steamers get lifted 3.7
metres up. Pretty cool, yeah.

Day 3 we drove to Broken Hill, via Wentworth where the Darling and Murray rivers
meet. Broken Hill is a very nice town, a little run down, but nice in a miners kind
of way, rough but warm (not literally =p). The annoying thing was, though, that we
stayed in Silverton, about 25km out of Broken Hill. The road to Silverton was shocking,
with about 40 places in the road where they didn't have the money to build a bridge,
so instead just made the road go down into the creek. A very rough ride indeed.
Silverton was nice enough though, for a town abandoned in the 1920s when the silver
mines ran out.This meant that everything in the town was 1920s original, restored
very accurately. It was here that Mad Max 2 was filmed btw, and his car is parked
outside the hotel, which looks very 'wild west esque'. That night we just unpacked,
and had dinner, and then a campfire.

The next day I went into Broken Hill, and after looking at the really boring train
station, and a rusty old 48 class loco doing some shunting I went to the music shop
to get the nut on my guitar fixed after the B string notch got exploded somewhere
between Charlton and Sea Lake. Then we went to Pro Hart's art gallery, which was pretty
fascinating, and then back to Silverton for lunch. For the rest of the day we looked
around old Silverton.

Next day was Sunday, we went to the Church of Christ, and then back to the caravan
for lunch. After lunch we had a tour of the old 'Daydream' silver mine. The most
annoying thing about this was that the miners, Cornish immigrants were only about
four foot tall, and so it was rather more like caving then a mine tour.

Yesterday we packed up and left Silverton. Lunch was at WIlcannia. Now Wilcannia is
a classic dodgy outback town. Everythings closed except for when the population get
their pay from Centrelink, as most of them are unemployed, everything's either
graffitied or smashed, there's broken glass everywhere, petrol costs 207.8 cents a
litre, you pretty much have to drive into someone's back yard to get it, and the only
greenery is the occasional abused mulga tree. Lovely place *coughcoughdie*.
We took as little time as was necessary, and just as the twenty or so gangish looking
aboriginal teenagers were starting to look a little weird we left. That night we
stayed in Cobar, in the only caravan park, which was right next to the petrol station
where the road trains fill up all night. Half of these were sheep trucks, so they
were noisy even when the engines were turned off. Also the peppercorn tree which
looked quite nice growing over our caravan site happened to be where the pidgeons
ate too many Eclipse mints it seemed, and congregated together to suffer their
consequence, which meant we had to spend a little more time than usual cleaning it
off everything. Other than these few things Cobar was a really nice place, people
were friendly and helpful and almost nothing was vandalized. Very different to
Wilcannia.

Today we packed up and left Cobar, which for an interesting point is almost exactly
900km due north of the Berwick-Pakenham area. We only had a short drive to Bourke,
160km. We left at about 10am and arrived at about 12:30. Bourke is nice enough,
OEC Silicitors have an unsecured wireless connection (however i'm using the
public library atm), and it's finally WARM!!! Yay!

The agenda is to stay here for tomorrow, and then the day after leave for Wyandra,
which is a little camping spot halfway between Cunnamulla and Charleville. The
day after tomorrow we are crossing the Queensland border as well.

Well, TY for reading through this massive PHD on the first week of our holiday.
Enjoy it =P

~Zackie