Farm Training Hell!

For you Beth... and how I felt ALL week!

Where we stayed... at sunset! :)

My Nemesis

You can't really see it but those are the paddocks with the

cows we mustered and chased us all week.

Ok so this Farming business is HARD! Hahahaha I knew it wouldn't be easy but I don't think we were prepared for all of this. We were thinking more physical labor in regards to hauling things, fixing things, loading, and things of that nature... but animals aren't my thing. To start off cows are scary and our trainer was horrible at communicating what he wanted of us and then yelled at us for not doing something right... how am I supposed to learn like that?!

At any rate we survived and without a scratch so I guess it was all fine but there were some moments let me tell ya. Richard, our trainer, started off by telling us every way you could kill yourself on a farm then just expected us to figure out the rest on our own. Chain saws were fun, horseback riding not so much, I pissed off the brown horse pictured up top and Richard wanted me to just keep riding and get the hang of it! Hello! I am so intimidated by big animals I'm small and never grew up near big animals what do you expect! Motorbikes were amazing fun and great to get away from the horses, but mustering cattle! Now that's a different story. Sitting in the Ute (Utility Vehicle pictured on Danielle's Blog) was easy and fun watching the kids that knew how to ride horses work their magic but once we got them in the paddocks we had to all get out (6 of us total) and chase them from one paddock to the other to try and get them up to the branding, tag checking and injection area of torture! Needless to say things were all going great until I was chased over a fence after a steer squared off with me and decided I looked like something fun to play with. 5 broken fences and two days later Richard said it was the worst 2 days he's ever had on the farm and that he was embarrassed his cattle were acting that way... made me feel better I thought I was just bad and the job and they were performing to my weakness. At one point Richard got in the Ute and chased the steer that thought of me as a play toy around the farm trying to get him back to the paddock but was unssuccessful and we broke for lunch. Yeesh!



Learning to drive the tractor was fun and something I could handle and fixing fences was great and so up my ally! We finally got a job in Dundoo by way of Cunnamulla (hahhahahaha yes that's a real word it's Dr. Seuss world over here!!!) doing maintenance, fencing and a little bit of cattle but he says his cattle are quiet... ahhhhh we shall see. To say the least it's been stressfull and worrysome but we are on leg three and 3 is both of our lucky number so we are going to pick up our chins and hope for the best! Judy (Richard's mom) took really good care of us. She is so sweet and understands how crazy all of this is and feed us amazing meals! I ate 3 meals a day! I haven't done that in... well I can't remember when I last did that. Hahahaha

Wish us luck!