We finally “escaped” Melbourne this morning and headed out on a 400+ km drive to a free camp site along side Lake Lascelles. There is supposed to be a donation box somewhere that we will contribute to – it’s a really nice spot, particularly after the cramped and noisy site in Melbourne.

The drive north west took us through a number of rain showers but it’s dry here at the moment. As we make our way towards and into South Australia it’s going to get a lot hotter and drier !

The town alongside the lake, Hopetoun, seems to be on it’s uppers, starting to resemble a ghost town with lots of boarded up and closed houses and businesses. Seems a real shame as the infrastructure looks to be in place.

The fuel level sender on the main tank has been playing up again so we let the main tank run low rather than filling up along the way. We’ve now exceeded 400 miles on the main tank since filling up and there’s still fuel left in it. Once camp was set up I took the sender out of the tank and checked it. There’s no sign of a problem that might be causing it to stick so it must be getting stuck against the side of the tank. I’ve rotated the sender slightly to move the arm away from the side of the tank – hopefully that will fix it once and for all.

We’re looking at travelling along a couple of the “Victoria’s Deserts” tracks tomorrow although having let the main tank run low we’ll need to find some fuel first so may end up doing a shortened version. We’ve been doing a bit of forward planning for South Australia too and started to get a bit of an outline route together.

We also need to replenish our food supplies somewhat but as we’re approaching both the fruit fly zone and the South Australia border, which has it’s own restrictions on what can and can’t be taken over the state border, we need to be a bit careful what we buy until we’re in SA.