We had our medicals at Katherine and it took nearly ALL day!  We left town at 3pm and drove for about 3 hours before stopping for the night.  Of course as we were heading towards home, it meant for early starts!! So the next day we were on the road just before daylight and drove a LONG way before stopping for the night.  You know how things can get a little silly towards the end of a long day?  This was only a little taste of it :)

The sun was setting on the driver's side that meant we were heading south!

After two really long days of driving, we came through Pt Augusta at tea time the night of the eclipse.  I was keen to get some photos so Bun decided that if we pulled up for the night too early, we would simply go to sleep and miss it.  So we ended up driving to Burra and stopping at about 9.30pm.  I set up the tripod and quickly grabbed some shots before we crashed into bed.  

Next morning we drove home, stopping briefly in Barmera to see Josh and this darling little munchkin!!

Luckily we got to take her home with us for the day!!!

Considering that Kasiah had only seen us on Skype since late April, she was so relaxed with us so that was lovely for us :))

We got to see Josh and Kara and feed them tea for a couple of nights so it was just lovely to see them all after so long!

Playtime on the floor!!

She just loves to snuggle in!

We even got to have her sleepover on the Friday night and this was her the next morning.

'What are you doing?'

'I think you've got the camera out.'

'Yay, I love photos!'

Saturday morning we dropped Kasiah home and went to Adelaide to see Callie and Steven.  After some text messages saying 'where are you?', 'are you nearly here?' and 'HURRY UP!'  we got there and left practically straight away to walk the dogs in the hills.  

The afternoon was spent on the seafront at the Largs Pier Hotel, enjoying a couple of relaxed drinks and then it turned into 'let's just order tea early'.  Such a chilled afternoon in the sun and we can't wait to be back there again in March for Josh and Kara's wedding!!

Sunday morning was walking on the beach, it was pretty cool and breezy and the sand was freezing on our feet! As usual, Boof loved it :)

We headed home Monday morning when Callie and Steven were ready for work.  We spent some more time with Josh and Kasiah before heading to Mum and Dad's for tea.  Kara met us there after work and we celebrated Dad's birthday a day early.

Tuesday meant a day trip to Mildura to get the truck serviced so we were there at 8.30am and used the motorbike to get around.  We visited Bun's mate Datesy for a couple of hours which was great, not just to catch up but also because we could sit somewhere warm!  It was so cold that day.  After getting a few things and having lunch, we ended up back waiting for the truck to be finished.  I got a call about 4.3pm from Viterra to say 'can you be here for induction on Friday morning?'   That meant that we only had the following day to get organised.....because we had to travel over to Lock on Thursday!  

We arrived here about 3pm Thursday having left at 6am.  At that point it was only going to be me doing the induction, as Bun's paperwork hadn't come through.  He was fine with that, as he said I could work and he would go surfing!!

Unlucky for him that I checked the emails at 5pm and his paperwork was through hahaha

He started work on Monday last week and I wasn't able to start until Tuesday as they didn't have steel cap boots to fit me.  I'm still wearing some that are too big for me!  We woke up one morning to this thick fog...below shows how close we are to work, literally right across the road.

Above you can see the weighbridge where I spend most of my days.

Sylvana really wanted to see a photo of the high-vis fashion!!

And the view from my window back towards the caravan park.

Trevor lives at the caravan park too!  What a face??

I've received a couple of chocolate bars from truckies and heard 'Hello Smiley' so I think that my customer service skills are pretty good!

It's interesting watching what happens around the site.

Josh and Kara visited Adelaide last weekend and Kasiah adores Uncle Steven!!  Callie said that as soon as she sits on his lap, she snuggles in :))

I love the above sentiment, it reminds me of the trip to the US with Callie and Steven and brought back memories of sitting on the beach at Santa Monica.

We are finding the work can be tedious and some of the people have obviously been here way too long however the money will come in handy and it really isn't hard work, just long hours.

I'm sure that having spent those few days home that the kids will be really happy when we are back after this job, especially with Ben moving to Adelaide in early December....and we are really keen to be home with all the exciting events that 2015 brings!!

There you go Kate, it's updated!!  Kate emailed me yesterday, there was nothing in the email, just the subject line reading   Blog Up-Date Please!

That's it for now

Cheers

Anne

It has been so good to catch up with Garry, we have been saying for well over 20 years that one day we were going to make it to Darwin and we finally got here.

We went back into Darwin on grand final day to watch the game at Garry's and also caught up with Shane Gartner and his partner Sally.  It was a lovely afternoon and evening, even though not everyone was happy with the footy result haha

I've been out again trying different settings on the camera and just had to remember to spray first!!  I told Callie that I have been glowing up here, if it's not from sweat it's from plenty of Bushman's repellant.  The humid weather is definitely NOT my friend and the bug bites have been driving me insane!

Three guys from Paspaley were out at Bynoe for a couple of days.  We got to go out in the boat with them one morning and have a closer look at the shells and see the shells getting cleaned.

The property is surrounded by the bay and if you zoom in on this photo you can see the van in the shed.  There are saltwater crocs around so you need to keep an eye out for them.  

This is how high the water comes up, the tyres go right around in front of the accommodation/kitchen/patio area.

I know Kara loves frangipanis so these photos were just for her :)

This photo was the sunrise, most mornings there was a lot of ripple on the water but this day was a little calmer.  There seems to be a few fires around most days so the smoke haze adds to the colour.

Above is the view from the patio area out towards the bay.

And looking back to the patio and the office and some rooms behind it.

Although I don't love the humidity at the  moment, I've been told (and believe it) that it is just magic here in the dry so who knows....maybe we'll be back next year :)

Josh took this photo a couple of weeks ago when he got home from work....love it!!

Absolutely cannot wait to see this cute little munchkin again!!!!  We have just seen her walking this morning while on a facetime call with the kids.  She is growing so fast and her parents say she has 'attitude' so we are in for some fun times soon!  I'm sure there were lots of giggles when she was getting painted (with help from two 'big kids' haha)

We are in Katherine right now and will be having medicals in the morning for work with Viterra.  All being well, we will be working at Lock or Wudinna for the grain harvest so will be back in SA and then home for Christmas.  

Looking forward to the dry heat of SA!

Cheers

Anne

While in Kununurra, we went on a tour around the agricultural area.  The guide turned out to be the brother-in-law of Peter and Jenni Jury!  The Ivanhoe crossing has been shut for the last couple of years as there was damage that has been too costly to repair.

We headed off from Kununurra and had a look around Wyndham before taking the Gibb River Road.  We left the van at the caravan park for this trip.  This was at The Grotto just south of Wyndham.  There were about 130 steps down into the gorge to see this.

We ended up stopping to help some Dutch tourists in a Britz 4wd with their second flat tyre of the day.  They were only about 10kms short of reaching the bitumen too!  Luckily for us and them, some other vehicles came along soon after who worked at El Questro station so they were able to help them.  Otherwise it would have meant us turning around and heading back, waiting around for tyres to be fixed and then dropping the guy back to their vehicle.  We decided to call in at Ellenbrae Station and stay there for the night.  This turned out to be a bad call!  There are plenty of stations along the Gibb that cater for tourists and this means that they are set up for campers with limited amenities but quite adequate all the same.  We spoke to the woman at the homestead, paid our money and went down to the camping area.  She was going to be down shortly to light the donkey heater for the hot water.  

On parking, I was going to head to the toilet but after walking a few paces and noticing that there was a bull behind a few trees, between me and the toilets, I decided to stop.  I watched him for a minute and decided that caution was a good idea and 'I didn't really need to pee just yet'!  As he started to walk away (I thought), I turned away and started to walk back to the truck.  Bun was watching and saw the bull wheel around 90 degrees and start to charge towards my back!!  He yelled out and I literally had about 2 seconds to register the noise, see Bun's freaked out face and think 'this is going to hurt'!  My legs must have turned to jelly, either that or a guardian angel gave me a shove haha.  I dropped to the ground and felt the snorting breath on the back of my neck and his hind leg gave me a glancing blow on my shoulder blade.  Bun said he was sure that I was going to cop the horns in my kidneys from the way he went for me!!  Soooo I ended up covered in dirt but without a scratch or bruise.....I really don't know how I escaped that one??  That bull sure had his cranky pants on though because he stopped about 20 metres away and turned to watch us, swishing his tail still.  The woman arrived a couple of minutes later and although I'm sure she thought I was over-reacting, once Bun told her that it had 'scared the f****ing shit out of him' she took us seriously.  She ended up having to chase him off in her vehicle because he really didn't want to move on.

We have laughed about it since, especially when telling the kids. I told Bun he would have to tell that story because the kids would just roll their eyes and think yeah Mum's over-dramatising again!  However we are both really thankful that I didn't end up in hospital or worse, especially when we talked to a ranger at Mitchell Falls a couple of days later and he told us that they had a woman gored in the National Park a couple of years ago!

Anyway that was probably enough excitement for us for the year!!

The Gibb River Rd wasn't really that rough we thought, especially compared to some of the other roads we've done in the last two years.  However once we turned off onto the Mitchell Falls road, it was another story!  That is seriously rough going....took about 3 hours to go 88kms!!  We walked to the Falls on the Sunday morning and had a swim at the top.  After talking LOTS of photos from lots of spots, we took the easy and scenic option of the helicopter flight back to the campground :)

Where's Wally?  Spot Bun in the photo above!

 On Sunday afternoon we decided that it would be a good idea to break up the trip back, so drove back out to the Kalumbaru rd and camped at King Edward River campground.  It was a full moon that weekend so Bun had been singing about "Kimberley Moon" so I set up the tripod to try to get a good shot.  Not so great but I'm still practicing.  At the campground at Mitchell Falls there was plenty of wildlife around during the night, including something we think may have been a sugarglider climbing up the ladder to the camper and hanging off the flyscreen!! Bun gave it a flick off, thinking it was a rat but decided later that it's tail was too thick to be a rat haha.

We travelled up to Kalumbaru on Monday morning and let me tell you, that WAS rough!  We looked around a bit and visited the museum at the mission before deciding to travel back down as far as Drysdale River Station and stay there for the night.  We were starting to run low on food by this point so thought that a hamburger would go down well for tea.  The standard burger there is $24 and the Kimberley burger (with extras) is $26!  They were tasty but we thought kind of overpriced.  I had paid for the night's accommodation at the shop but when I went to pay for the food as well there, the girl told me that she would fix it up at the bar later.  When Bun was buying drinks later, I thought he had paid for the tea.  The next morning when we were chatting, we suddenly realised that neither of us had paid!!  Each of us had thought that the other had paid LOL   Oh well, you get that sometimes :))

As we were nearly back towards El Questro there was a controlled burn happening, we were just happy that the road wasn't shut.

The Pentecost River crossing.

We did a tour from Kununurra that took us by bus to Lake Argyle, across the dam and then onto a boat for the cruise back along the river.  We would definitely recommend that tour to people.

Not our best look haha but you take what you can get sometimes!

This is a similar boat to the one we were on.

Before leaving Kununurra, we bought ourselves anniversary presents :))

We don't usually 'do' presents but thought that 30 years is a bit of a milestone!  Bun will now look classy for the weddings and I plan to visit the Jewellery Doctor when we get home, thinking I will get my engagement ring remodelled to include this and maybe some stones from my other jewellery?

After crossing into NT, we loved the sign on here!

We got into Darwin on Monday and settled in at the caravan park.  Garry Penno came out to the park for tea and Bun asked him if he remembered what he had been doing that night 30 years before....he was MC at our wedding reception!  It is so lovely to catch up with friends and it's like you talked to them last month, not years before.

Tuesday morning we went into the waterfront area early so that we could walk around a bit before it got too hot.....I checked the weather and at 8am, it said 30deg and 83% humidity!!! What the hell??

We had been trying to decide what we were going to do about work because we had scored jobs for both of us at a mango farm just outside Humpty Doo.  However that was going to last for at least 8 weeks and Bun said that he wasn't sure that I would cope with the heat and humidity.  Garry is the Farm Manager for Paspaley Pearls and offered us a couple of weeks work, cleaning, gardening and some cooking at one of their properties at Bynoe Harbour.  We had also applied for work with Viterra back in SA for the grain harvest but hadn't heard back.

We ended up ditching the mango farm for the caretaking job for Garry and thought that we would just wing it after that.  As it turned out, we got called by Viterra yesterday (Friday) and fingers crossed, will get a call to have medicals up here and then be offered jobs.  It is likely to be at Lock or Wudinna and we would be working 6 days a week, possibly starting in about 4 weeks.  That would bring us closer to home and probably finishing just in time to be home for Christmas!

We will head out to Bynoe tomorrow with Garry and stay there for the next couple of weeks with maybe one trip back into Darwin for stores, depending on how things go.  

We didn't even look at the price of this but it would be fun on the bike track!

Thank goodness for shady gardens in Darwin and the glorious colours of the flowers.

I thought it would be nice to have a photo from our anniversary but Bun was worried about his wrinkles so he tried to get rid of them LOL!

Not bad to still be laughing together after 30 years!!

Well that took a while to do this update but now that's done, we are about to head off to Garry's to watch Port play and have a BBQ....tough job but someone's got to do it :))

Cheers for now

Anne