Today was a day of rest with a two hour bus tour of the area scheduled to happen prior to happy hour. Today an invitation had been given to the locals (local population is 660) that for a gold coin donation, they could inspect the motor homes. The locals would also be providing lunch for the cost of $2.00.
We headed into the local shopping centre and purchased some essential supplies (milk, cereal, tomatoes, Jack Daniels etc, etc).
After lunch, about 80 of the safarites packed into two buses and headed out to a property managed by the local Coleambally Irrigation authority. It was explained to us that the township was built in the 1960 as a result of the Snowy Scheme and resultant schemes to provide irrigation to inland NSW. It was also explained that this part of Australia produces about 70% of our food source. After this informative talk, we headed to a local nursery that is responsible for providing something like 200,000 saplings a year for the regeneration of relevant areas. As an example, the nursery provided approximately 100,000 saplings for planting adjacent to the Melbourne freeways.
We attended happy hour after the trip and then headed to the local bowling club for a Chinese banquet. The meal was excellent. Highlight of the night was “What Car is That” when the safarites dressed as a motor vehicle and you had to guess what they were. This was a lot of fun and once again, a lot of people when to a great effort.
Whilst we attended the evening function, we left a fan running in the motor home attempting to extract the build-up of hot air that had accumulated during the day. This would be a further check of the battery capacity and it was a good felling to note that we still had heaps of power when we finally turned the fan off. The motor home was still warm when we went to bed but fortunately we were able to sleep through the time without discomfort. Someone mentioned today that it will only get hotter as we start to travel to the west and into South Australia.