Bay to Birdwood – Day 6 – Loxton to Broken Hill

On Day 6, we started out in South Australia, crossed over into Victoria for Breakfast and then into NSW for Lunch, before ending back on South Australia Time.

As usual we left Loxton early and headed to our first destination, Merbein. This was the only part of our drive where we overlap with the route we used to get to South Australia.  There is about a 50km stretch of the Stuart Highway that is the same, including driving underneath the big Dunlop Tyre.   That was fitting for me since my 450SE is shod with Dunlop tyres.

Merbein is the most northerly town in Victoria.  It was originally separate but now seems more of a satellite town of Mildura. we ate at a local bakery, which was fine, although the town seems to have fallen on hard times.   Quite a few shops were boarded up.

After Merbein, we crossed over the Murray again on a single lane bridge, before heading north through Wentworth and over to Pooncarie road.   Pooncarie road leads up to Menindee and was only sealed a few years ago.  Most of the heavy trucks seem to use the Silver City Highway so traffic was very light, just the odd caravan.   It is very remote through typical outback scrubland and cattle farms.   There is actually quite a lot to see, including herds of goats, Emus, Cows and one of our group even saw an Eagle.

I enjoyed the drive and we stopped at Pooncarie for fuel and lunch at the Pooncarie Pitstop.   I had a rather good hamburger.   After Pooncarie it was more of the same until we reached Menindee for another stop at the local supermarket.

At the supermarket the man running it told us about the car show the town runs bi-monthly.  He also told us about a local man who owns 20-30 cars and who is always happy to show them off.   Since the owner of the cars wasn’t answering his phone, he left a message and .gave us directions to his home.   Sure enough, after a donation to charity he was very happy to show us off a great collection of cars.  Many of them were fords with the 351 V8, but there were also a couple of Chrysler products and some more recent performance holdens.   It was a great impromptu tour, especially as we were ahead of time.

After Menindee, we headed in through Broken Hill and over to Mundi-Mundi lookout near Silverton.  The road from Menindee to Broken Hill was pretty good.  It started to wind through foothills and was quite enjoyable.   The road from Broken Hill to Silverton was not.  It is sealed, but it is full of dips and and it is not all that pleasant to drive on.  It was worth it though, as the view from the lookout was pretty good.   We were able to get some great photos of the cars there.

After the lookout, we headed to the infamous pub in Silverton for a beer.   It was quite a characterful pub and had a lot memorabilia from the Mad Max movie.   From there, we headed back to Broken Hill and our hotel.   We had covered 592km today and 2,898 since we left Sydney.

Since the hotel wasn’t really all that close to a place for dinner, we ordered Pizzas to the hotel.  We tried a few local places who were all closed on a Monday.   In the end we found one on uber eats.   It had been a good day.  The scenery driving through areas like this is like nothing else in the world.

I last visited Broken Hill back in 2022.  That was was on the very first one of these trips.  I was in my 1977 450SLC and we came in on the Barrier Highway from Adelaide and stopped for lunch on the way to White Cliffs.