Silver City Highway Menindee to Tibooburra
We left Menindee Lakes and headed to Tibooburra. We would have liked to stay another night or two at Menindee, we liked it a lot. Had to pull over before hitting the bitumen to put air in the tyres. First stop was in Broken Hill to get fuel then off along the Silver City Highway to Tibooburra.
The Silver City Highway
The Silver City Highway is a good bitumen road with a pretty desolate view of rocky plains and in some places sand hills all the way to Packsaddle Roadhouse. It took us a couple of hours or so to get to the Packsaddle Roadhouse and then the road changed to dirt. We pulled over to lower tyre pressures and a nice old bloke pulled over to check that we were ok and warned us off the upcoming road conditions. He mentioned corrugations and lots of bulldust holes and sandy stretches. Was nice of him to stop and give us an update. To be honest though the road wasn’t too bad. There were some stretches of absolute garbage but for the most it was ok.
There were also quite a few stretches that had been sealed fairly recently. I am guessing the sealed bits were where they were having troubles maintaining the dirt to a decent standard. Later on as we got closer to Tibooburra roos and emus by the side of the road kept us on the lookout, there was a LOT of roadkill lying about.
Tibooburra Caravan Park
We checked in to the Tibooburra van park for a few nights. More of a bush camp than a proper van park but the showers were nice and clean and after roughing it in the outside shower tent with minimal water a nice hot shower was very welcome plus we needed to catch up on a few loads of washing. While unhooking the van I noticed that we had lost or Anderson plug from the van on the road. It had fallen out and been dragging. I had a spare so it was no big problem. We’d been having a few problems keeping the fridge cool so I had run the van with the fridge switched to DC and it must have cut over to the battery after the plug fell out so the battery was down to 12v. We spent the evening around the fire talking to some people from Newcastle.