Day 8: The Mighty Murray!

I left Coon­alpyn this morn­ing feel­ing pret­ty awe­some. I’ve got­ten a large por­tion of my jour­ney out of the way, I’ve stayed at some great places, met some love­ly peo­ple, and seen some beau­ti­ful sights.

I stopped at the Coon­alpyn Silo Café for a cof­fee, and it’s the nicest one I’ve had on my trip so far — high­ly rec­om­mend! Had an inter­est­ing chat and bummed a cig­gie from some love­ly locals out the front.

From Coon­alpyn the ride was still pret­ty flat, much like the trip from Bor­der­town to Coon­alpyn the day before. I was swooped by a hell of a lot of mag­pies today, so my first reac­tion when I arrived at Tailem Bend and a wedge-tailed eagle flew over me and fol­lowed me for about 150 metres was to fear it was a mag­pie and cringe, but I realised pret­ty soon after that what was going on and had one of the moments of the entire trip. Just the sheer beau­ty of these birds… glorious!

The next moment of the trip was­n’t far away: as I pulled into Tailem Bend, on my left the hous­es cleared and I got my first glimpse of the Mighty Mur­ray Riv­er, which I’ve nev­er seen this far west before. I love the Mur­ray Riv­er, I call it ‘home’ and feel a deep con­nec­tion to it, so this was a won­der­ful moment in the trip when I strug­gled to con­trol my emo­tions and my hap­pi­ness at hav­ing made it this far.

When I pulled away from the riv­er to con­tin­ue my jour­ney and bang! my trail­er’s tyre blew out, I was­n’t even miffed. I was still on such a high from the eagle and the riv­er that I sim­ply replaced the tyre with a smile on my face and kept on rolling…

I stopped at this kitschy lit­tle pio­neer vil­lage tourist attrac­tion, most­ly to gawk at the nice old vin­tage cars parked at the front. I grabbed a cold drink from the café/gift shop there and kept going.

It was at the turn-off to Mur­ray Bridge that the high­way becomes off-lim­its to cyclists, so I rode up the back road to Mur­ray Bridge, crossed the Bridge itself and found the infor­ma­tion cen­tre in town. With no avail­able free camp­ing, and the ther­mome­ter show­ing over 30ºC, I decid­ed to cycle for a lit­tle while look­ing for a place to camp on the sly, but end­ed up lodg­ing at the Mur­ray Bridge Mari­na & Car­a­van Park, who pro­vid­ed me a sec­ond night for free.

With tomor­row set aside for some R&R, fish­ing and not much else, I made camp and set­tled down for the evening…