A long ride to Tail M bend

After directing Mum and Dad in the kennel pack up, we left our pretty little tree lined island park behind and drove the minute and a half into town and stopped right out the front of the Kelpie centre. Yep - we're such a cool dog that they've even dedicated a full time museum to us.

Bet you've never heard of a Border Collie center and if there was one it wouldn't be as cool as this. So I dragged Mum and Dad inside and we looked around for bit, learnt the history of my most magnificent ancestors, watched some videos and sniffed the posts. I would've loved to have pee'd on them, but good dogs don't do that indoors.

It was a bright sunny and quiet morning as we strolled down the street afterwards to caffeinate the parents whilst the Dad one got more and more anxious about all the trucks on the road, with the realisation that it was now a working day and as such the traffic over the last two days had been relatively quiet. We wandered back to the rig, I jumped into the back seat and promptly directed Dad to drive me to the Terra Rossa soil place.

The drive out of Victoria and into South Aus was quite picturesque with winding rolling hills covered in pine plantations slowing giving way to flatter drier countryside. Penola was a quaint tree filled town, the streets with olde' worlde' buildings where we stopped to use the public loos (well I used the bushes out the front, makes me wonder why Mum and Dad don't just do that as well) and then we hit the Coonawarra region. Dad really wanted to see this and was pretty happy that he did. All the big names that had been on the labels over the years now had context as we drove past them, stopped for a while at one place that seemed not so commercial (Majella).

I had to stay patiently outside whilst they went in and came out laden with boxes which went into the kennel and the car and then off we went again.

Now the drive was getting tricky as it was single lane and 110kms per hour. With the swaying issue still evident those speeds were not on, so we become one of those annoying people that holds everyone else up and possibly costing them precious seconds in their lives that they will never get back. Wasn't too bad though - no one really seemed overly stressed. It was a long ride in the back seat as we headed northwards as the landscape slowly turned drier, more sparse with occasional salt lakes and heat mirages on the horizons. Wheat belt country (with enough sheep and cattle to ensure still plenty of kelpies in back of the farmer's utes). They'e not so sophisticated out this way though as the only painted silo we saw had people on it - no dogs! I directed Dad to keep driving, no point in stopping at a place that does not revere us with the passion we deserve.

Luckily for Mum and Dad I'm a good dog and so didn't complain about the long hours as they rolled by listening to incessant voices blaring out the speakers in the manner of pods casting their wares (or something like that - I couldn't really make sense of what Mum called it). We eventually rolled into Tail M bend (which sounds painful to me) with the low fuel light flashing and the stress levels rising. The lady in the console who tells us where to go told us to go to the wrong location, in completely the wrong direction and we ended miles out of town staring down a narrow road wondering how to turn the rig around in such a tight spot. I directed Dad with my mind power control tricks and we got around, back into town, got fuel in the tank and eventually made it to our new overnight kennel location on the top of a cliff overlooking the mighty Murray river delta.

It's a really cool spot, the wind blows a gale so we can't hear the road noise, the afternoon sun beats down on the baked cliffs and yet the owners seems to have spent a lot of time planting grass, installing viewing platforms and even our own private Idaho park down on the river. I've made friends with the dog next door and this means we can both try to take control of the stick situation.

We headed into town to the shops to get some shorts for Dad (yay for Vinnies - saved enough money there to cover the costs of a lot of bones for this here canine) and to the supermarket to get some crumbed chicken to grill on the outside gorilla under the awning of the kennel. All whilst I got to run around chasing balls in the vicinity (and what I know as bounds) of our lovely grass covered site.

Sunset was an extremely noisy event with thousands of Correllas and Galahs heading off home after raiding the nearby silos, all throwing insults at each other as they swarmed overhead in an apparent display of boisterous rudeness that you can only personally get away with when your part of an overwhelming horde. Sort of like Hawthorn supporters at an AFL match.

And then as the sun whipped away over the horizon to throw some more heat on the Middle East, the wind dropped and all that earlier noise seemed to be quite pleasant in contrast to the (now apparent) road noise of the incessant trucks heading to and from Adelaide and Melbourne. Occasionally the frequency drops which then allows to sounds of the trains and sirens of the ambulances to cut through the night air instead.

As I'm a dog, I don't really care, seems like the rest in the kennel are slightly agitated about it though.

And then there was silence.

A duck quacks nearby.

And then another road train roars into the aural landscape.

Note to self - views are nice, silence is better.