Totally Unrelated

I'm a massive fan of cheese jokes and I spotted this on a sandwich board outside a store in Mildura. Enjoy! 

Driving Me Wild

We currently have a new job! It's shit but this is farm work, nobody promised me it would be exciting. I won't bore you too much with the details but we're basically rebuilding the structure that grape vines are wrapped around. See, super riveting stuff. 

But, on the plus side, someone clearly has a sense of danger as I've been allowed to DRIVE a vehicle! Yep, I don't actually own a UK license but as we're on private land, letting me loose on a blue, 4 wheel drive quad, that I've affectionately named Henry. Granted, I can hardly zip around the farm as I'm driving round a pretty hefty trailer but it's still the most fun thing I've done on a farm yet. 

I have, however, lost any dignity that I may have remaining (insert joke here about how I didn't actually have any dignity left anyway) as, due to a lack of toilet facilities on the farm, I've had to pee behind a massive twig pile recently. This is coming from a girl who, despite being a festival regular, refuses to use anything other than a portaloo when surviving in the great outdoors. Luckily, I've only had to resort to such behaviour once and that was shameful enough, thankyou very much. 

As I write this, I only have a week before I take a short break from my farm work expedition to make a fleeting 13 day visit home and I genuinely could not be more excited! Whilst I'm not looking forward to not having anyone to chat to in my bedroom in the morning when I wake up (travelling makes you actually enjoy sharing a room with God knows how many people, who'd have thought!?), I cannot wait to use my beautiful, clean bathroom back home without having someone knock on the door wanting a wee! 

Getting Lost

The past week hasn't been great for us girls when it comes to work. We worked too fast on our previous farm and caught up with the vine pruners meaning we had nothing left to roll onto the wires. You can't win here, sacked if you're not good enough or running out of work because you're too good! So we had about 60% of last week off with no way of earning any money.

As you can imagine, we got very bored of staying in the house all day. Turns out there are only so many films you can watch in front of the cosy fire everyday. And Mildura isn't known for being the entertainment capital of Australia so our options of things to do were very limited..

We ended up at a giant maze. It cost us $2 and actually turned out to be a lot of fun, I kid you not. Situated about a 10 minute drive from Mildura town centre, it's attached onto Woodsies Gem Shop, a small store selling every kind of gem in various forms of trinkets, ornaments and jewellery. How does that relate to a giant maze? I have absolutely no idea. 

9 of us headed into the maze and ended up splitting into 4 teams and I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't win. But I did come second which isn't the end of the world. For someone like me, who tries to complete pretty much any task in life as efficiently as possible, the maze drove me insane. I was cursing like a sailor as I took more than enough wrong turns and ended up in the same spot yet again, much to everybody's amusement. The boys were last to traipse out though which was a boost for girl power!

Thankfully, we are on a new job now so we aren't scouring TripAdvisor for things to do or crawling the walls with boredom anymore but we are still pauper poor until we get paid so that's always fun. Who knows, I might find a natural skill on the next farm?! Jokezzzzz.

It's Happened, I've Screamed

It's day 11 and the inevitable has finally happened, I saw a scary spider. And I screamed. 

Two of the girls and I spent the day gardening and the monstrous creature appeared from under a pile of leaves. As soon as I spotted it, I threw my tools to the ground, screamed and legged it to the other end of the garden wailing at the girls to kill it. Totally appropriate adult behaviour. 

I'd normally add a photo onto every post but funnily enough, I wasn't going to stand around and take a photo of the hideous 8 legged beast. And I'm certainly not googling, "spider" for a stock image as I'll probably end up peeing myself. Soz. 

Drama In Mildura

Believe it or not, Mildura actually experiences drama every now and then! I know, I was shocked too.

In the hostel, we all live for Saturday nights. It's the only night we all let loose and drink as much goon as we can before the taxi arrives to pick us up. We head to the same place most weekends, it's free entry, the drinks are cheap and the music's pretty good. 

But this weekend was a bit more dramatic than most, it all kicked off pretty early on with punches and glasses being thrown aplenty. Apparently one of the poor girls behind the bar ended up on the receiving end of one of the glasses! 

From what we could gather, a bunch of guys from one of the other hostels in Mildura kicked off, for whatever reason, at pretty much anyone who might have a go back. There were bouncers everywhere and the police were drafted in resulting in the whole night being shut down and everyone wandering the streets wondering where the hell else in Mildura you could buy a vodka at 12:30.

We ended up in a bar where a guy dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants seemed to be the main form of entertainment, I kid you not. 

And I didn't even get a kebab on the way home, Laurie and I were pretty much devestated when we got home and realised all we had was toast. 

Sunday was spent down by the river that splits Victoria & New South Wales (miss you, Sydney!) in what turned out to be a surprisingly warm and sunny day considering it's now winter out here! My friends spent the afternoon fishing for, or at least trying to, the carp that swim in the waters whilst trying to avoid the various pelicans and ducks that sit atop the water. 

After various snapped lines and false alarms, one of the boys actually caught a HUGE fish. He offered it out to me to hold but I politely declined, slimy sea creatures totally aren't my thing!

And in the blink of an eye, the weekend was over and a whole week of work lay between us and alcohol once more. Considering how often I've thought I hated Mildura, sitting by the river when the sun sets was actually pretty decent (despite how bloody cold it became, I could barely feel my feet!)

 

Spoke Too Soon

I blogged yesterday about how I was still managing to function like a normal human being whilst working on the farm. I clearly spoke too soon as today I could have easily thrown down my tools, told the farmer to do one and jumped on a plane back to city civilisation. 

Don't get me wrong, I had my reasons for throwing a complete wobbly, I'm not totally unstable.

For starters, I'm experiencing yet ANOTHER eye infection out here, the fourth in almost as many months which is extremely frustrating. And working in the blazing sunshine with an eye infection is nobody's idea of fun, it basically burns your eye ball and has you tearing up like a toddler constantly. Plus, I was the slowest girl on the farm today which, for a crazy competitive person like me, could probably drive you clinically insane.

Whilst wrapping vine upon vine round metal wires today, I continuously had the thought that 88 days of this wasn't worth a second year in Australia. But then rational, grown-up me gave childish, tantrum prone me a good talking to and I'll be heading back to work tomorrow.

So, it's only day 7 and I've already had my first thoughts about giving up. 81 more days of this is going to be a piece of cake..