During the night, the predicted change that was to hit Victoria, arrived. In a way, staying at Wodonga, we were lucky in that although we experienced a very windy early morning and a couple of light showers, it certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been had we been further south. We had watched the news on TV in the morning to see the damage the storms had done to southern South Australia and Victoria. We were hoping to make it to the town of Murrayville, close to the SA/Vic. border but the weather was going to determine if this was possible. Our planned route took us through the river town of Echuca and this was because Rob wanted to call into another favourite bakery, The Beechworth Bakery, for morning tea. (We used to call in here on our way to and from the ski fields.) We had left Wodonga at 7.15am and so were well and truly looking forward to this stop and it didn’t disappoint. The wind continued to increase and we passed many trees that had either been uprooted or had limbs torn from them. Luckily we only saw one large limb that had fallen across the road but by the time we reached that particular spot, the huge limb had been cut up and removed from the road. We continued on, stopping at another river town, Swan Hill for fuel. For most of the time we could feel the strong wind pushing us across the road. On the two way radio, we even heard truckers saying they were glad they were in a huge truck to protect them from the incredible wind. We had to stop at spot to dispose of some fruit in a special quarantine fruit bin. The wind at this particular place was so strong, I had difficulty opening my car door! Of course you can imagine that our fuel economy was very poor today too. As we drove closer to South Australia the wind was still with us but not quite as strong as it had been earlier in the day. We manage to make it to a favourite, community park of ours, at Murrayville. For $20 a night, we have power, water, beautiful amenities including a laundry. We headed to the local pub for dinner and had a funny night. We’d been to this pub last year and had a lovely meal so thought we’d do the same but things didn’t quite work out that way. We asked about meals at the bar and were told that unfortunately, meals weren’t been cooked due to a fire in the kitchen last December. They offered reheated meals and as we had nothing left in the van for dinner we thought we’d go with it. Unfortunately the meals were the frozen re-heated meals and they weren’t that great but it was better than nothing. On a positive note, we met a lovely younger couple who were on their way to Loveday to potentially purchase a bus to convert into a home to travel around Australia in. They too had also purchased a re-heated meal for dinner. We all had a little laugh about the meals but really understood that the pub was trying to stay afloat. They wanted to travel all around Australia and work so they were very interested in what we’d done. They had booked a room in the pub for the night and were wondering what that would be like.
