Slow Roads and Momenti Rari: A Winter Caravan Trip Through the Riverina
4 July 2026
If you have been following this website for a while you will know that I have written about the idea of Momenti Rari in the context of Italy, those places and experiences that are not on the typical tourist list, that are uncommon or unexpected or that may simply disappear one day if not enough people take the trouble to find them, and what this trip through the Riverina taught me is that the same idea applies just as much to travelling in Australia, particularly when you are willing to slow down and take the roads that most people drive straight past without a second glance.
There is a particular kind of travelling that the caravan makes possible and that no other way of getting somewhere quite replicates, and it is the kind where the journey itself becomes as important as the destination, where the road you take matters as much as the place you end up, and where a town you might otherwise have driven through at a hundred kilometres an hour becomes somewhere you stop, get out, and actually see, and this trip to Griffith was exactly that kind of travelling, giving us things we had not expected and showing us places we might never have found any other way.
We had been to Griffith many times before, several years ago, the usual quick dash out and back along the highway in the way that you do when time is short and the destination is the point. But this time we had our caravan and we wanted to do something quite different, planning a circular route so that we would not retrace the same roads and could explore as many different places as possible on both the outward and the return journey. So instead of the direct route that would have had us in Griffith in just over four hours we chose the secondary roads and planned no more than two to two and a half hours between overnight stops, giving ourselves the whole of each travel day to stop when something caught our eye, take side roads when curiosity pulled us off the main route, sit down properly for lunch, have a good coffee and a rest instead of grabbing something in a hurry along the way. Then still arrive at our camp destination in plenty of time and without any sense of rush. What we found along those secondary roads and in those quiet country towns more than made up for every grey sky and rainy morning the Riverina winter could throw at us.
Weethalle silo art, a moment of extraordinary beauty in a small and quietly struggling town
The towns that time is leaving behind
The most memorable and in some ways the most affecting part of this trip was not Griffith, which we had known would be wonderful, but the smaller towns we passed through on the way. Towns like Harden, Barmedman and Weethalle that are slowly and quietly becoming something between a memory and a place, and where the general feeling of emptiness and gentle decline settles over you as you drive through the streets and notice what is no longer there, the closed shops, the empty buildings, the absence of the kind of daily life that once made these places proper communities with a pulse and a purpose, and where you feel the particular sadness of understanding that this is not a temporary situation but a long and ongoing process that began when the railway declined and the farming changed and the younger generations drifted away to bigger towns with more to offer, and that nobody has quite found a way to reverse.
What strikes you most about these places is not the emptiness itself but the beauty and the dignity that remain despite it, because Weethalle, with its population of barely a hundred people, has grain silos painted with enormous and extraordinarily accomplished murals, a shearer bent over his work on one and a wheat farmer standing proud in his golden field on another, both painted with a skill and a confidence that would not look out of place in any city gallery. The effect of finding them here in this small and quietly struggling place is genuinely startling, as if someone decided that beauty was not a reward that small towns had to earn by being large enough, and that this particular place deserved something wonderful on its skyline regardless of how many people would ever stop to see it. Standing in the winter drizzle looking up at them I thought about what those murals must mean to the people who live there and see them every day, and how many people drive past Weethalle without stopping and never know they exist.
And then there is the 1928 Royal Hotel in Weethalle, that beautiful two-storey federation building with its wide verandah and green iron columns, standing on a quiet corner with the green winter grass in front of it and the dramatic grey sky above it, looking exactly like it is waiting patiently for something, and you hope very much that something comes. Like this Royal Hotel, we come across others on your trip, all beautiful and nearly all silent and sadly closed.
Temora, Boofhead, and a free night at the station
Temora station, Boofhead on his trunk, and the names of branch lines that no longer run
Temora was one of those stops that surprises you in the best possible way, beginning with the railway station which is now a beautifully preserved museum in that deep Riverina red with ornate ironwork and the old signs still on the wall listing connections to Griffith, Hillston, Lake Cargellico, Rankin Springs, Burcher and Naradhan, all those branch lines that no longer run but whose names read like a poem about a country that used to be connected very differently, and sitting alongside the platform is Boofhead, a small bronze dog standing on a brass trunk with his own plaque telling his story, the kind of quietly wonderful detail that makes a place feel as though it has a soul as well as a history.
We had found this spot through WikiCamps when planning the trip and knew it was set up as a free overnight stop for caravanners with a donation box for those who use it, but what we had not expected was how well organised and easy the whole thing would be, because the parking area outside the station is fully sealed just like a normal car park, which on a rainy winter night meant no mud, no soft ground to worry about, no anxiety about whether we would be able to get out in the morning, just a lovely level spot next to a beautiful old building, and drifting off to sleep with that station just outside turned out to be one of the small and unexpectedly perfect moments that slow travel keeps delivering if you are willing to let it.
Griffith and the Italian connection
We had been to Griffith before but we had never seen the Pioneer Park Museum, and this turned out to be one of the real highlights of the entire trip, an extraordinary open air museum that tells the story of Griffith and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area through actual buildings moved from their original sites and reassembled into what feels like a small village, each one containing its own piece of the history of this remarkable place and the people who made it, and within the Pioneer Park you will find the Griffith Italian Museum and Cultural Centre, a museum within a museum if you like, which recognises the significant contribution of the Italian community to the social, cultural and physical development of the region, a contribution that goes back to the very earliest days of the irrigation scheme and that shaped Griffith in ways that are still visible and still felt everywhere you go in the town today.
The Griffith Italian Museum and Cultural Centre was largely built and funded by the Italian community of Griffith themselves, driven by the passion of Italian descendants who wanted those pre-war migration memories and experiences to be recognised and preserved for generations who would come after. For me, arriving in Griffith as an Italian-born living in Australia, there is always something that tugs at my heartstrings when I see what those early migrants built here, so far from everything they knew, in a landscape nothing like the one they had left behind, on land that had to be made productive through extraordinary collective effort and will and determination. Walking through that museum, you feel the weight of all of that wanting and all of that work, the determination that this should not be forgotten.
And then we had coffee at Zecca in town, and it was one of the best coffees I have had in a very long time, which tells you everything you need to know about the Italian connection in Griffith being very much alive and very much worth seeking out.
What the Crusader Warrior and the weather taught us
Our Crusader Warrior held up magnificently through weather that was, to put it charitably, not what you would order for a caravanning holiday, most days grey and wet and cold and one night in Cootamundra where the rain fell so heavily on the roof that at times it felt as though we were parked under a waterfall rather than in a caravan park. We had originally planned to do a mix of paid caravan parks and free camping, but the weather made us do the sensible thing, and we decided to keep mostly to established caravan parks rather than risking the kind of mud that can turn leaving a campsite into an adventure of entirely the wrong kind, with Temora being the one happy exception.
What the weather really taught us, or perhaps confirmed for us, is that flexibility is the most important thing you can pack, and that having no plans set in concrete means you can pivot when you need to, take an extra hour somewhere that rewards you, skip something that the rain makes uninviting, stop and enjoy a lazy lunch and change your mind without any sense of failure or frustration because there was nothing rigid to fail, and this willingness to let the trip be what it wanted to be rather than what you had planned for it to be is something I would recommend to any caravanner, but especially to those of us who are still in the early stages of learning how this life works and what it asks of you.
The other thing that worked beautifully was the food preparation I had done before we left, the pre-cooked dishes, the ready-to-go vegetables, the recipes that work just as well on the Dometic slide out kitchen as they do in the kitchen inside the caravan, and which meant we were never at the mercy of what was open in a small town, which in winter on a wet day is often nothing at all.
If you are curious about the approach I use for cooking on the road, you will find all of it in my little ebook Taste of Italy on the Road, which saved us more than once on a cold wet lunchtime in a town where everything was closed and the only question was what we felt like eating from our own beautifully stocked caravan kitchen.
We are still learning, and this trip taught us more than we expected. Among other things, we learned the whole business of hooking up the caravan to the ute and preparing everything to leave a campsite, and then doing it all in reverse on arrival in the pouring rain, which sounds straightforward enough until you are actually standing in a downpour working out where everything goes and in what order. Those are exactly the kinds of things that no amount of reading about caravanning can really prepare you for until you have done them a few times in less than ideal conditions and started to find your rhythm. And beyond those practical discoveries the trip gave us something else too, the quiet accumulation of small decisions made well and small pleasures discovered slowly, in towns that most people drive past and in places that most travel guides do not mention, and in the particular satisfaction of arriving somewhere you had not planned to stop and finding something there that stays with you long after you have packed up and driven home, which is, I think, exactly what slow travel is supposed to feel like and exactly what Momenti Rari are made of, whether you find them in Italy or on a rainy back road in the Riverina.
Grazia