Broken Hill was the second stay of our three day drive from Forster, NSW to Clare, SA – a total distance of 1700km. This journey became known to us as ‘the great escape from NSW’.

At the time, it was an escape from torrential rain and flooding. A bit further down the track, it was also an escape from the COVID-19 pandemic – we remained in COVID-19 free parts of Australia until the state and territory border restrictions were lifted.

When we left Forster, South Australia was a COVID-19 free area – and they had closed their borders to any other State or Territory with COVID-19 cases. At the time that we made this journey, NSW was also COVID-19 free – so all we had to do was fill in a declaration form and get a border-crossing approval notice from SA police.

We also had to keep our fingers crossed that there wasn’t a COVID-19 outbreak in NSW before we arrived at the SA border – which we would reach on the last day of our three day drive.

The drive from Dubbo to Broken Hill was 750km, and we stopped briefly in Nyngan and Cobar. The drive from Broken Hill to Clare on our final ‘escape day’ was 400km.

When we left Broken Hill it only took about 35 minutes to get to Cockburn on the South Australian border. After that, we passed a string of very abandoned looking settlements before we finally arrived three hours later in Burra. From Burra it was only 30 minutes to get to our final destination – Clare. Yes, we had completed the ‘escape’.