Well its been nearly two months since I left home to have an adventure in the land down under. And so far it has been an adventure but right at this time it is getting a little boring since I am doing the same job here that I was doing at home only with lower quality equipment. John Deere really is the best, sorry to all you misinformed other farmers! Haha Lately has been a little busier around here and this week looks like it will turn out to be quite busy. The sheep shearers start tomorrow and there is a lot of spraying to be done and the remainder of the sorghum is being harvested at the end of the week. I don’t know how much I will be doing with the sheep but I actually hope not that much. I don’t really like sheep a whole lot. I would prefer to spend a day on the tractor if it was my choice but I only do what the boss tells me. I have not played any rugby lately because my knee is still wonky. I got to say I have kind of lost my interest in rugby, just don’t have the motivation to play and after this weekend for sure not. Walgett played their first season game and had one guy break his arm in two places, one dislocated finger, a neck injury and one guy with broken ribs. While I am on this trip I would rather not be laid up for a few weeks. I would get destroyed if I played league games because I don’t understand the rules properly. 

I have to admit that I have been missing family and friends a lot lately, a real case of backpacker blues. Apparently a lot of first time backpackers get a little homesick at the two month mark and then get over it by the three month mark. Which I think is definitely the case since after this job is done in mid june I plan to do some adventure stuff. I plan to travel with an English bloke that I met in Coonabarabran. We want to travel from Darwin down through the Red Center to see Ayers Rock and then on down to Adelaide. It is a two week journey with a few nights under the stars in the middle of the desert. It sounds like a lot of fun, riding camels, swimming under waterfalls, spotting crocs and rock climbing mixed with doing some opal mining and spending a night in Coober Peddy. Its a town where almost everything is underground, shopping and churches included. Its kind of pricey so I will have to find a job once that trip is over. I think I will try to find a job in Melbourne, it sounds like a really interesting city and everyone from there thinks its the best city in Australia. But we will see how things pan out over the next month or so. And that concludes April 2012. 

Well its been a while since I updated ya'll on what is happening down under and my mum is on my case about that so here goes. The last few weeks have been spent waiting for rain and then waiting for it to dry.  We were going to start sowing the beans last week but then it rained which was good, but then it rained to  hard and we had to put it off until this monday. But then it rained so we had to put it off again! It is not a lot of fun when it goes like this. But unless there is more rain we are starting first thing tomorrow morning and then going 24 hrs a day with two operators taking 12 hour shifts. And speaking of things being delayed, the sheep shearing crew was scheduled to arrive on Thursday but the wool press is broken and now have to wait for another one to arrive from Dubbo. So that is delayed until next week monday. My boss is going a little nuts with all this delay and I don't blame him!
So while we are waiting for weather to be right we were cleaning up silo bags from years past. When the roads are to soft for transport during harvest the grain gets put in big bags 75 meters long. These bags had gotten wet during the floods so the bottom foot or so of grain was unsellable (is that a word?). So now we had to shovel a path across and cut them into sections we could handle and pull them out from under the grain. Its super heavy and wet and smells worse than pig doodoo! Oh and did I mention that there are usually a few snakes underneath. I got to shoot a few big Brown snakes with a twelve gauge shotgun, good times! But we are mostly caught up with that job thank goodness, only four or five more bags to go.
    I usually go into town on the weekends for a night or two. Go to the local sporting club and have a few beers with the locals and listen to people try and sing. It is quite humorous sometimes! Pete keeps bugging me to go up and sing some Bryan Adams cause I am Canadian. That has not happened yet, I told him on my last weekend in Walgett I might try it. I should really sing every time because the first twenty get a twenty dollar voucher for the bar and restaurant. And if you win the night its another 100 dollars! But I have a job where public humiliation is not required so I'm happy with that!
    Rugby season starts on Saturday and if I want to I can play. Im not sure if I want to play my first game of rugby in front of a crowd of thousand plus people that all know the game. I have not been to training for the last few weeks because my knee is acting up again from spraining it playing bush league hockey in February. I have been trying to strengthen it by doing some light workouts and stretching but so far not much improvement.
    I am figuring out that I did not have a clue what I needed to pack when I came over here. I have way more clothes and stuff than I need! I have a wheeled luggage bag but think I might change that to one of these huge trekking backpacks. It would be so much easier for traveling around. I had planned to head to the coast after walgett but it sounds like I will be meeting up with an english bloke and head up to Darwin and then travel through the center of Australia to Ayers Rock and then on to Adelaide.
    Tomorrow is ANZAC Day here, its a day to celebrate the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp. It is a pretty big deal but I will miss the festivities in town because of sowing. I am attending a ball on Saturday to raise money for the Walgett show that goes on in May. So I gotta get spiffy and stuff, it will be a good place to meet some more of the local people which is always good. But this is gettin pretty long and I can always post another. Miss you Canadians!

P.S. If anyone wants to skype with me just send me a message on Facebook or something and we will try to set something up.

Two weeks here in Walgett and still liking it a lot. The people i am staying with are awesome and feeding me very well. The boss, John Holcombe and his wife Terry are a mid fifties couple with two married sons, Richard and Pete. 

I got lucky with my work placement, Pete is the president of the Walgett rugby team. I have been going to practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I follow the others around with what im sure is a confused look on my face. I am learning a little but still don’t have any idea why they do what they do when they do it. But tackling the big bags is a lot of fun, run at top speed, lower the shoulder and slam the bag down as hard as you can. But its not all smooth sailing for me, I sprained my knee playing hockey in february and now with rugby its acting up again. I keep meaning to rehab the knee every evening but that doesn’t seem to happen regularly.

The job here is pretty similar to what I did at home, spraying, seeding and stuff like that. I still can’t quite comprehend that there are winter and summer crops here. We are going to start planting the winter crops shortly, probably mid april. All the crops are zero till and there are permanent tracks on the fields where the seeder, sprayer and when possible the harvester travel along. They don’t even plant in these tracks so there is no seed wasted which I think is a great idea. The fields or “paddocks” are huge! Most of them are around 1500 acres or more. The longest field is 3 km from one end to the other, a really long time to sit and do nothing when you have auto steer in the tractor, which we have here thankfully! The other day when we were cleaning up some old silo bags we had a little excitement, five Australian Brown snakes were living under there. These snakes are about five or six feet long and one of the more venomous snakes in Australia. We killed them all with shovels but the next time we clean up more bags we’ll bring the shotgun to take care of the buggers.

I imagine i’ll be here until mid june or so and then im not sure where I want to go. Im thinking maybe the Queensland coast. Travel from Brisbane to Cairns along the coast, sun sand and surf sound great. I need to find a travel buddy, it would make the whole experience even more fun. I have met some people that I may meet up with at a later date so hopefully that works out. Johns cousin was here for a few days and said that if I wanted to stay at their place on the Gold coast I was welcome to do that. So I think that if I go up to Cairns I’ll definitely do that.

I am starting to understand the accent around here for the most part but still have to ask people to repeat themselves sometimes. I am getting used to having geckos in the bathroom and frogs everywhere but they still scare me sometimes. 

Last week I went into the bathroom and just about peed meself, a gecko ran across the wall right in front of my face. Now I am always prepared when I go in there!

If this sounds like i am distracted its because I am, trying to type this, watch tv and listen to the conversation going on around me. Not really working. I miss you all back home!