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Trip Start
Oct 28, 2009
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Trip End
Nov 27, 2009
Berri SA, South Australia, Australia
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The weather was quite changeable on Saturday. We needed the air con in the room in the arvo, then the rain came and we were quite cold, later the temp climbed again, even though the rain continued.
Overnight we woke a few times to the sound of heavy rain.
Sunday
Breakfast at the Renmark Hotel Motel, another community hotel venture, our timing was lousy as the breky took 45 mins to arrive; cutting it a bit fine for our next port of call. Luckily the pancakes were 'light & fluffy' as described on the menu and the bacon & eggs not bad either.
Port of call literally, as we took a ride on the Big River Rambler, a 1 hr cruise towards Paringa from Renmark. The captain's commentary was really informative and he had the perfect voice for it too.
He pointed out many koala, spoonbills, egrets, nests in the trees & 'rafter?' birds; the history of the River and towns; and why white man messed around with the flow of the river. Then the rain started and we jumped up to go down the ladder to more shelter - sadly Sandy's postage stamp - uhh hat - blew off her head and into the Murray. It surfaced once quite a way behind the boat and that was the last we saw of it :-(
From Renmark we drove to Loxton to check out some of the historical sites. Decided to skip the Village, but we checked out the 'Tree of Knowledge' and went for a drive through some back streets, partly because Sandy's still learning the GPS. We saw a road closed because it was covered with water, the fire truck was there pumping up the water; and drove along another road where the water all but covered the road. Glad we didn't have to get into this driveway. During this outing we had the roof on because of the rain, roof off -nice, roof on -burning hot and roof off again some rain, but not enough to cause a problem.
Then the GPS switched off and locked up, whilst we were on a 10km unsealed road. We headed back to Berri, had a very late lunch and a walk then returned to our room to read all the brochures we'd collected, type the blog and check out the Austar sports channels.
Back to Berri - gave the GPS girl a full charge and firmware upgrade and she is happy again...phew. Quiet night with dinner at the pub and then a night watching the Twenty 20 Cricket.
