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!