Today we went riding to the little village of Mintaro which is not far from Burra. It has beautiful old bluestone and slate cottages and there is an operating slate mine. We turned up at the mine and some nice workers came out to see our bikes, next thing one of the workers was giving us a special tour of the slate mine and she gave us a free sample of slate for our rock collection. This is lovely dark blue slate that paves some streets in Adelaide, and is us...

Dave is right; Burra really is a living museum. Those old Cornish miners in the 1800s sure knew how to build beautiful buildings out of the local stone. We have bought a key system to get us into a range of tourist history sites around the district, which means we use a key to get into old buildings, cellars underground, a gaol, museums etc. Plus today we rode out to the main old mine working, which ended up being an open cut in later years. The pumping machinery...

The trip from Mildura, Victoria to Burra, South Australia was very interesting. We stopped for lunch in Rennmark which would be worth a visit again one day. Situated on the Murray River, it was a very neat and pretty town. Since we were in the area I had wanted to go to Banrock Station ( of Banrock Station wines fame ). They have reportedly been doing wonderful things with restoring the wetlands on the Murray River. After another tussle with the GPS and a bit of...

We are packing up today, with a sad heart, after learning of the deaths of two of our fellow club members who were travelling to the AGM in Mildura. We have decided to go on to Burra, South Australia. We had some wonderful discoveries when we did a trip to the Victorian Mallee area to look into the location of Tom O'Louchlin's Solder settlement block in Wemen. Trish will write more about that once we are settled. Dave

We woke up to a beautiful sunny day in Broken Hill, packed up and got on the road. The trip to Mildura was great then spent the rest of the day at the caravan park catching up on a few things. Yesterday we explored the town and Visitor Information Centre, then off to look at the Muarry River and it's Weir and Lock 11. We were lucky enough to be there when a Paddle steamer entered the lock to go down stream. I took photos of the process of lowering the lock. Tri...