After we had waved goodbye to Willandra and our friends we had to backtrack to Griffith to retrieve Monty from the kennels before continuing on our adventure.
Griffith is a very large town and serves as the big, go to place for remote communities in this part of New South Wales. There is a huge poster at the entrance to the town boasting that one in every four glasses of wine produced in Australia comes from Griffith. That seemed like a bit of a bold statement but the first two wineries we drove past were Yellow Tail and De Bertolli so maybe not an exaggeration after all. 

Monty was mighty relieved to see us and we decided to stay a night in Griffith rather than pressing on further that day. There was not a great choice of caravan parks and we plumped for one right in the centre which was a bit on the trashy side but quite cheap, $20 unpowered which was pretty good for a town centre. We wondered about the big gates that were locked at nightfall and all the digital locks on the showers and toilets but didn't think much of it until it started to become apparent that the park seemed to be home to people the council could not find homes for - mainly because nobody wanted to live next door to them! We left pretty sharpish in the morning and carried on our way past cotton fields again heading for Booligal along a 50km dirt road. There wasn't much there apart from the Duke of Edinburgh pub so we pressed on because we needed to get some more kilometres under our belts in order to reach our next target destination of Menindee by the following night.

 The Cobb Highway took us through the Long Paddock where sheep, cows and goats just wandered into the road when they felt like it and past Mossgiel which had an information point so we got out to have a look. Mossgiel was once a boom town but, because of the combined pressures of drought, typhoid, a mouse plague and an egg shortage it all fell apart and now only one house remains. 
 Eventually we rolled into Ivanhoe which is the kind of small town which usually offers free camping. This little town didn't however and there was only one place to stay so we had to pay $23 for an unpowered site which was a bit steep for a town in the middle of nowhere. All was forgiven however, when we sampled the showers which were scorching hot and wonderful, very welcome as it became really cold there as evening approached.
The following morning we had a bit of an explore and found that Ivanhoe was struggling. There were closed shops including the most beautiful store with old fashioned cabinets and signs still visible on all the sections leading the customer to Haberdashery, Hats, Coats, Frocks, Mercery and Manchester! Probably the funniest of these terms is Manchester which is the name for bed and table linen but it is still used all across Australia and we regularly hear it on TV adverts. The most worrying closed shop though was the grocery store. This little town was in the middle of nowhere and there was not anywhere apart from the petrol station to buy food. The locals were trying to drum up enough support to start a community grocery store, I hope they succeed.
 The next 210km of our journey was along an unsealed road. Driving along dirt roads certainly keeps you awake, it was a very long, straight route with flat landscape as far as the eye could see so a tarmac road could be quite sleep inducing. We were driving alongside the Indian Pacific Railway but did not see a single train and we only encountered seven cars on the whole journey to Menindee Lakes. 
Once we arrived we headed for Lake Pamamaroo and set up camp for free on the edge of the lake. It was sensational, the most beautiful place I have ever camped. The lakes were full because it was a wet summer in far west NSW and there was an astonishing array of waterbirds. Spoonbills, herons, egrets, cormorants and even pelicans make their home there which I was stunned by because how did they know to travel inland to find this place?
 There were plenty of other birds too and the sunsets were to die for, we could not believe our luck.
Although we were free camping, a proper toilet was provided in the nearby Burke and Wills campsite, so named because Menindee was the last place Burke and Wills camped before they set off on their ill fated trek to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860.  They succeeded on their mission but perished on the return journey when they reached their camp only to find that their support team had given up waiting for them and left just 9 hours earlier.
 The town has a population of 900 and is a mix of beautiful and hideous buildings. They certainly make the most of the Burke and Wills connection as there are references to them everywhere and there was a big memorial on a rock outside the pub where they spent the night, presumably their last in proper beds. After a quick look around we headed back to our gorgeous camp on the edge of the lake and spent the next few days trying to get pictures of birds and sunsets.