We awoke to a cooler morning, which was a relief from the heat of the previous few days and would allow us to do a bit of site seeing.

We decided to use the Chaffey Trail as the basis for that, but skipping some of the listed stops as we'd visited those on previous visits to Mildura . The Chaffey brothers, George and William Benjamin (WB), who came to Australia from California where they were developing an irrigation settlement played a major role in creating the Mildura Irrigation Colony back in 1887, planning for parks and transport. The Trail traces this development.

Our first stop was the recreation of the first Mildura Station established in 1847 by the Jamieson brothers and later purchased by the Chaffeys. The recreated site has a homestead, shearing shed and other buildings of historical significance. Nearby is the site of Mildura's first cemetery which includes graves of some early pioneers and members of the Chaffey family, most notably the first wife of WB Chaffey.

Our next stop was somewhere completely new to us. Part of The Chaffey plan involved a large steam driven water pump on the Murray at Psyche Bend and a series of billabongs to raise the water to the level required for irrigation. The pump built in Tangye, England in 1889 and commissioned in 1891 is housed in beautiful brick building, but unfortunately it is only open for viewing on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday and as it is Monday, we just had to imagine what it looked like from the tourist brochure pictures . But fortunately the pump has been restored and perhaps in an even bigger project an un-used loco boiler has been installed in an adjacent building to proved sufficient steam to allow the pump to be run on just a handful of special days of the year - we'd really love to see it operating!

 A couple of other points on the Trail were also closed on Monday and so we left the Trail and headed to the Australian Inland Botanical Garden just over the NSW border towards Wentworth. By now the temperature had risen to a point where we didn't want to do too much walking, but we saw plenty by following the self-guided driving tour and getting out at a few spots to look at particular features. An impressive sculpture featuring an emu and her chicks was just near the start of the tour and it reminded us of the real thing we had seen when at Lincoln National Park, but had not been quick enough to capture them in a photo.

There was a beautiful planting of Sturt's Desert Pea and the colour was very intense . To celebrate the efforts of the Gardens volunteers the ceiling of a summer house had been covered in seed pods from various plants. A 2500 year old Eucalyptus - called the WOW Tree - shows the ability of the species to survive drought and fire.

From the we went on to Wentworth, which is where the Darling River joins the Murray. Apparently you should be able to see the two diffent colours of water water merge given the Darling is clay based while the Murray is sand based, but we couldn't see that.

One very interesting artwork adjacent to the junction is where there has been some landscaping on the levy bank. Initially this looks quite random, but when you go to one particular designated spot, the landscaping forms the foreground of a scene which incorporates the house rooftops, trees, poles and signs above the bank - pretty smart!

Today is our 35th wedding anniversary and so we decided to have dinner out, even though we'd nominated our dinner out at the Port Lincoln Marina Hotel as our anniversary dinner. So we went to the Curry and Tandoor Indian Cuisine in Langtree Avenue. Despite the place being very busy and service being slow when we arrived, things picked up and we had a very enjoyable dinner.

Fueled the Territory up with diesel ready for the run tomorrow to Swan Hill and did a swap-and-go with one of our gas bottles which had just expired on the way back to the caravan park.