Well, in the middle of all the “excitement” of the last 6 weeks, I neglected to update you on the Jeep and the Jayco. All up, not much change out of $7000. Thankfully most of it was on expected wear and tear. The Jeep chewed through most of that with new rotors and discs and those diff mounts finally HAD to be replaced. The Jeep front bushes and springs are not really designed to carry a bull bar and were starting to split, so they were replaced with after- market upgraded ones.
The Jayco was mainly to replace worn or broken items – nothing major. A latch here, a strut there. We had a troll living in the corner cupboard (aka the water pump). Pumping water seemed to be an act of torture for the poor thing. All that whining and groaning and we STILL had to run around under the shower rose to catch the trickle. Now, the new, yet un-named BF, hums quietly to itself and cascading H2O has returned.
There was one more thing. Every six months or so, we’d have to replace the jockey wheel. Alko after Alko. Made in China and the most easily available but clearly not up to the task of handling a tow ball weight of 350kg. And besides, the wheel itself served no purpose and was the culprit in several unhitching near-disasters in the last two years. So, I rang ahead to Mildura and ordered an Aussie made jockey ‘stand’ – no wheel, just a flat base and rated at 570kg. I guess, that was the motivation I needed to leave Cohuna and get serious about my next destination.
Getting to the SA border, meant re-tracing some steps from a couple of years ago, including the little town of Koondrook, where I slipped across the border into Victoria like a fugitive, in the middle of the Covid lockdowns. Following a lead from an RV website, I found myself at Psyche Bend on the outskirts of Mildura. Psyche Bend is a large rambling free campground and there were some clearly long-term ‘guests’. Nestled on the banks of the Murray River, Pysche Bend was one of several pumping stations built in the late 1800’s to pump water from the Murray up to the plains above. I had a couple of days to wait for the jockey stand to arrive from SA. So I laid low, as it were and as luck would have it, the restored pumping station was open for visitors.
If you look closely, you can see the flood line from the December floods of 2022. The used oil from the sump pit underneath the pump floated to the top of the rising floodwaters leaving a distinctive reminder of how powerful the might Murray can be. Despite the impressive display, this picture was the highlight of the visit. Talk about right place at the right time.
It’s now Friday morning. I’ve given myself two days and 600klms to get to Hawker, the doorstop to the Flinders Ranges. I picked up my jockey stand from Mallee Bearings, raising it to the heavens in triumph, then headed for the border.