Tuesday, 28 July 2026
After just a month at home, we hit the road again this morning, heading back to Marree in outback South Australia to pick up our tagalong tour of the Simpson Desert. Originally this trip was supposed to fit seamlessly on the beginning of the half lap of Australia that we completed between April and June. Cyclone Narelle had other ideas though, and dumped too much rain in Queensland in March, which flowed down into the Simpson Desert rendering it the Simpson Swamp in early April. Our tour was rescheduled to depart on the 1st of August and so, here we are, on the road again!
We are not due in Marree until Friday afternoon so we are taking our time to travel there. Rather than make the trip in two eight-hour-plus (700 kms) driving days we are pacing ourselves with a more leisurely 300-400 kilometres/day. So leisurely in fact that we did not pull out of the driveway until 10.15am this morning. That’s a very late start on a road trip, ha, ha.
We travelled by the quickest route as determined by Syri. Along Bell Street and onto the Tullamarine Freeway before peeling off onto the Western Ring Road and then the Western Highway (M8) heading for Ballarat. With rain forecast for Melbourne later in the afternoon we found ourselves driving into cloud and rain as we travelled west. Although probably just par for the course driving towards Ballarat in the wintertime?
With this route having been travelled many times before we motored along without stopping until we reached Stawell. We turned off into the town centre, where we pulled up at Waark’s Bakery which declares on its facade that ‘It’s Very Nice’. It was just ticking over one o’clock, with the Town Hall clock opposite chiming one as we exited the truck.
Time for lunch! I ordered a toasted sandwich and Bernie opted for a sausage roll and a pasty which we ate in store. And very surprisingly … we resisted the vanilla slices. Bernie was in Drouin yesterday, so we ate country bakery vanilla slices last night. In fact, we had a highly calorific weekend, helping my sister to celebrate her milestone birthday, so we made the decision to eschew sweet treats today. Very unlike us to exercise such willpower!
Continuing westwards, our next stop was at the Australian Pinball Museum in Nhill. Bernie stumbled upon this attraction a couple of nights ago when he was looking for points of interest along our route. We parked outside the museum which is located beside the Oasis Motel arriving at the same time as two other carloads. Damn, if we’d been a bit earlier we would have had the museum to ourselves.
We wandered in and tried to convert a $10.00 note to tokens. The machine didn’t like Bernie’s $10.00 note so he had to resort to changing two $5.00 notes instead. Armed with $5.00 worth of tokens each, Bernie picked a Star Wars themed machine and I chose a Simpsons game. OMG, we were crap at playing pinball. We were never big pinball players anyway and any skill we may have had when were younger was not evident today. We both blew our first token (which gave us three balls each) in under a minute. Embarrassing.
We checked out a couple of other rooms looking for the interpretative stuff. You know, that would explain the history of pinball machines and the history of the museum. Nope, just pinball machines for you to play. We then made the mistake of choosing expensive machines that cost two tokens for three balls. Once again we lost our three balls in record time. And by that I mean record shortest time. We were hopeless.
Time to cash in another $5.00 (the machine still wouldn’t accept the $10.00) for five more games on the single token machines. I played the Dr Who machine and managed to keep the balls in play for more than a few seconds. We eventually managed to eke out our $15.00 investment into half an hour of entertainment.
Back on the road, we only had a half hour drive to our destination for tonight, Kaniva. We parked in town near the Big Windmill and took a stroll around the Sheep Art Trail. Started in 2010, Sheep Art is a fun community arts project that celebrates Kaniva’s sheep heritage. The Sheep Art Trail features murals, tours and a wool stencil wall, recording over 100 property wool stencils. Grazing sheep are still very much part of a sustainable agricultural future for this area to improve both soil health and plant biodiversity. Hmmn, plagiarising this description from the internet, I realise that we didn’t find the wool stencil wall. Maybe we’ll try to track it down before we leave town in the morning?
We did walk as far as the silo art. We stopped briefly at the silo on our way through Kaniva at the end of June, but discovered today that there is a much better vantage point from which to view David Lee Pereira’s artwork. In June Bernie photographed it from the outside of a locked gate, but today we found the official viewing area, which afforded us a much better angle from which to appreciate the Australian Hobby (Little Falcon), the plains sun orchid (on the left) and the Salmon/Pink sun orchid (on the right) all of which are native to the nearby Little Desert National Park. The artwork was completed in 2020 after an epic 200 hours straight of painting using 400 litres of paint. For an added degree of difficulty, the artist endured rain and … attacks by cockatoos!!
It was too cold to explore further, so we retreated to the Travellers Inn Kaniva Motel. We transferred some gear into the room and cranked up the heating. We had planned to walk to the pub for dinner but, shortly before 6.00pm, the heavens opened. Although the rain had stopped by soon after 6.00pm we decided it would be wiser to drive to dinner. It was already cold, we didn’t want to risk getting wet on our way to and/or from dinner.
We drove along the highway to the roundabout at Madden Street where we were stopped by the temporary roadworks stop light. We sat and waited, and waited … and waited at the head of the queue with absolutely no traffic coming from any other direction. We felt a bit daft and I was worried the truck behind us was going to get on his horn because we were stopped for, seemingly, no reason at all. Eventually, after a very long wait, a line of traffic came through from the west and the light turned green for us to make our way around the roundabout to the pub.
After parking the truck, we wandered into the Commercial Hotel, the first and last pub in Victoria, to be greeted by the owner behind the bar. He then proceeded to recommend just about every item on the menu, which didn’t make it any easier to make a selection from all the usual pub classics. Bernie eventually decided on the ‘new’ item menu, the Outback Parma. A chicken Parma topped with caramelized onions and grilled cheese. I opted for the lamb shank.
We petted the pub dog, Shelby, and checked out the Route 66 memorabilia, while we waited for our meals. The food was good, although I was a bit surprised to be served chips and salad with my lamb shank rather than mash. Delicious thick cut chips though, so I’m not complaining.
Steps: 6,580 (4.39kms)
