23/04/26 Wentworth to Outback Almonds

 I had planned an early getaway. That didn't work. Instead my neighbours Glenda and Michael stuffed me full of tea, toast, and honey while the early morning ticked away. Eventually I rolled away along the Darling. Whereas I was able to stay beside the river on the Murray,  on the Darling I'll spend a lot of time out on the flood plain, with the river nothing more than line of trees over in the distance. There's a lot more fences to separate me from the water; there's a lot more distance between resupply points, and I have to think carefully about my water. But today I was just headed for Outback Almonds, a farm stay 40 kilometers up the river from Wentworth.

I pedaled through Pomona, which proudly introduced itself as a community built by 'settlers working together'. It was obviously an irrigation community with armies of grapevines marching beside the road all dressed in their autumn finery. And just past Pomona I found a little gravel track to the river and spent an hour sitting happily cradled in the roots of a large gum tree, watching fish splash in the water while pelicans swam formations in the distance.

My sitting tree.

There are six flying pelicans in this picture.

Some days you just pedal. The sun shone, the breeze blew, three planes in a row dragged contrails across the sky. At Outback Almonds Tegan was greatly excited to see me, astounded that the bicycle had carried me this far and I didn't even have a battery! Her husband Tom escorted me to unpowered camping on the clifftop above the river. There was green grass, hot showers, and a cute little open kitchen shack. "You're the only one here tonight," said Tom. "Make yourself at home."

In no time at all I had washing hung up all over the place and no intention whatsoever of pitching my tent when I had a perfectly good deck to sleep on.

I built a camp-fire and christened the billy I bought in Mildura.  I'm glad to say the billy worked as intended: I had deb potato and burned rehydrated peas for dinner and they tasted really good when I turned the lights off.

I slept strategically placed so as not to trigger the motion-activated solar lights but in the end it didn't matter because a fat moth was hell-bent on triggering them anyway. I put on my sleeping mask and tucked myself in under the table for protection against being moth-bombed in the middle of the night.