I spend the small hours tossing and turning wondering how I’m going to fulfil my promise to Issy that I’ll work out how far it is to the horizon when you’re standing on a perfectly flat plain. I have nightmarish visions of diagrams of the earth with a small person standing on its surface, and of my fingers not being able to find the right buttons on the Google machine. There's only one way out; I get up and try to work it out. I think the answer is 4.85 kms if you're my height and standing on the equator, but only 4.84 kms if you're standing at one of the poles. If you're Issy's height the corresponding answers are 4.59 and 4.58 kms. I hope she's not too disappointed that she can't see the extra ... read more

First stop this morning is the Line of Lode Memorial. This is named after the local ore body, and sits atop the mullock heap that overlooks the town. I tried to come up here after dark last evening to take some happy snaps of the town at night, but the gate at the base of the hill was locked. A forbidding looking sign said that it was too dangerous to access. I assumed from this that the mullock heap had suddenly become unstable, and that whole great chunks of it were now at risk of sliding off and engulfing half the town. I'm a bit surprised then to see that the gate seems to be open this morning, and, for that matter, that most of the town hasn't been evacuated. Hmmm. Surely they couldn't have stabilised ... read more

Today we head north to Broken Hill. Issy asks what towns we'll be going through along the way. The only name we can see on the map is the town of Scotia. It seems that "town" is maybe overselling it just a tad. The ever reliable Wikipedia shows it as being the size of a small African country, but with a population of 26. Armed with this new information and the knowledge that it's 300 kilometres to our destination, we decide that it might be wise to fill up with petrol before we head off. We start to feel like we've really entered the outback. It becomes noticeably more arid as we proceed northwards, and the vegetation sprouting from the red dirt gets progressively shorter until it verges on the non-existent. The only sign of human ... read more

It's Mother's Day, but there are no sleep-ins or breakfasts-in-bed for Issy. Our not so kind hosts (refer previous entry) need us to move apartments this morning. We’ve been told we have to be out of this apartment by 10am on pain of death, but apparently we can't get into the second one, several kilometres away, until 2pm. So it seems we‘ll be temporarily homeless. Our hosts keep sending us emails asking us for feedback. I would have thought we gave them more than enough last night, but they're clearly gluttons for punishment. I salivate as I think about what I'm going to put in the review. Soon after we’ve moved out they ring us to tell us that they've again (?) gone out of their way to help us, and have arranged for us to ... read more

We're a bit weary after a late night of conviviality, so we bypass breakfast and move straight on to a very pleasant lunch. "Spoons" restaurant is apparently a Swan Hill institution, and we dine in an idyllic setting on a large deck among the gum trees overlooking the Little Murray River. Issy's still feeling a bit tired after last night's libations, so I head off on my own to the Pioneer Settlement, another of Swan Hill's river-side institutions. It was opened in 1966 as a re-creation of a small pioneer-era Mallee town, complete with church, school, Masonic hall, blacksmith, houses, and Main Street shops - post office, bank, newspaper printing office, dentist, barber, etc. The dentist's implements look every bit as scary as today's versions, which is a bit worrying given I'm fairly sure that the ... read more