Up fairly early, beautiful morning: so off on the bikes to Lake Mournpall - a 20km round trip.
We saw a couple of different little mobs of kangaroos and rode alongside some for a while. More birds: Lily has adopted the duck as her mascot/totem, and they do seem to keep popping up to say hello. Also saw rosellas and lorikeets darting through the trees in pairs. We weren't really darting, riding up and down swooping sandy dirt tracks, but it was a great ride.
We stopped in at a grave - James Mahon - who had drowned in the creek in the 1920s, aged 63, and been buried there. Strange that no one bothered to or wanted him taken anywhere else, but now he's got his own little cemetery, a sign and the Friends of Hattah had a working bee to make sure his grave was clearly marked.
Breakfast. Then what? Off we went for a 10km run, according the map.
We stopped by the visitor information centre to pick up said map. We looked at said map. And Lily, in an ominous start, stated: "We go left, then left, then right: yeah?" Tim looked at her for a second. Asked her if she was sure. She was. Sure sure? Yes. Okay. We just need to swap all those lefts for rights, and that right for a left and we're good.
So we set off. Happy running. Felt lovely. We've settled into a pattern of running for half an hour then walking for ten minutes to eat, drink and sort out gear. It's been working well and we thought two cycles would see us through the 10kms easily - and we'd be back at the van before it got too warm. We were running really smoothly and cruised out the main track and onto the smaller track (the Nip-Nip loop) which was to take us around a couple of lakes and back to our camp. We missed a turn. The turn missed us. It was a mutual thing.
We ran along a roo-fence. This was really unfortunate for the stressed-out roo who felt like we were chasing her and who took a long - long - long time to work out that bounding ahead of us then trying to jump the roo-fence (and only managing to tangle herself up in it for a while) was not the way forward. Eventually, to our relief as well as hers, she decided to turn left and - Ah! The sweet smell of escape. ("Go have a lie down, girl, it's the middle of the day!")
We carried on up the fence, heading north when we should have been heading west. Happily cruising and chatting, we logged another 5kms before we thought- Hmmm. Once we'd established our position, we thought we'd head west from where we were, down a 4wd track, rather than backtrack. The 4wd track ended at a dry lake. Between us and the road home was a few kms of bush, water holes and mudflats. Go back for 15kms? Or go forward for... how far do you think it is Tim? I think 3kms. How do you feel about going into untracked bush, Lily? Yeah, I'm not that comfortable with it (said in a high pitched squeak to reinforce her assertion of absolute uncertainty). What do you think, Tim? I think we should do it. I like walking off track. It's good country for it... (no it wasn't - lakes and mud - but it wasn't too bad: we got around everything and without any scratches or wet feet.)
Just before coming away, Tim had taken three-and-a-half hours to paddle 3.5kms of a willow infested, blackberry strewn creek with no water in it. Lily had been waiting at the end expecting him to be back within an hour. The police were called. The friends we were having dinner with were called. But Tim just plods his way through such problems, and that's why Lily, nervous as she was, chose as her mantra: "Trust Tim" and headed off into the bush, relying on a bad map and the fact that in the southern hemisphere, at lunch-time, the shadows point south. So if you're walking with the sun on your right cheek, you're heading west. So we headed off. A long time, but only 3.5kms later, we found the path.
On the way, we managed to wake up a few roos, included the biggest reddest male either of us had ever seen. Easily seven foot tall, it stumbled up out of it's sleeping dust bath and bounded away with his mates. Pretty cool. Once on the path, we saw a goanna with a tail about 2 foot long amble across our path and into the bush. After 20kms of walking/running, navigating and not arguing (!) we made it back to the van. (Tim breathed a sigh of relief that the decision to "Trust Tim" hadn't ended in complete disaster.)
We packed up a litle later than planned and headed to Red Cliffs. This is where Tim's mum lived until she was seven, so we were hoping for a bit of history. Driving through all the orchards was great but Red Cliffs itself didn't offer much. An IGA. An uninspiring pub that didn't do dinners on Mondays, and The Red Cliffs RSL. Determined to taste some local culture, we had dinner at the RSL. The vegies in the bain marie were delicious. The end. From there we set out for our camp site at Merbein Common. After almost giving up and deciding to camp in the carpark of the local skatepark, we found our new home, and it was a winner. River Access #6.
