Apricots and Irish Adventures...

Well this last week has been a long one! We spent 9 days straight picking and packing Apricots. It was fun and very interesting but anything after 9 days is a little much! We were so tired by the end of that time we all barely spoke words to communicate to one another... just those tired half hearted grunts and nods of the head and quick flick of the hand. Garry the owner of Willra (the Farnsworth station we have been working on for the last month) hired 5 more backpackers to help us out on this endeavour! They were all from Ireland! 4 Lads and 1 Lass. Too much fun listening to them talk and banter with each other. What happens is you stand on this trailer with three different levels and the tractor pulls you along the inside of the orchard so you can pick all the apricots at all levels at once. You dump the contents into a box in front of you and when it's full you turn around and exchange it for an empty box placing the full one on these huge frames that are on the other side of the trailer! It's insane but so cool and I'm sure dangerous on some levels but once you've survived a motorbike crash you think you can survive anything so it's all good. Haha just kidding all you fuddy duddies out there! It wasn't that bad! We picked for a day and a half and then headed off to this packing shed which is basically a factory for fruit! I've never worked in a factory before but now I have a whole new appreciation for my parents as they have worked in one ~ hmmm come to think about it that's where they met and fell in love... awww how sweet! Well it came full circle for me and man it can be crazy! First you dump the fruit onto this conveyor belt and it travels through the picking spot where the bad ones get hand picked and thrown out. Then they travel down the wash line and get sprayed with water and sucked under a brush to clean them off then they are spit out onto a ramp where they fall onto these scales all lined up in this huge line that continuously moves and they get dropped off at each station according to their weight. They fall into a box and that's where you pull the bag over all the apricots when it's reached max weight and you pass them to the lid guy and he stackes them on a crate to go off to sale. It's very interesting. We had to make the boxes and lids before we got started and line the bottoms with bags. A very hands on job. Although it's not something I would want to do forever it was very interesting to see how the process works and I was happy to be a part of it.

Our new Irish friends were so fun. As we picked apricots they started playing this question game to pass the time. I feel that I've played it before and it won't be anything new to you but with Irish accents and banter it made it oh so memerable and funny! The person that is "it" picks a topic like, Film, Sport, TV Program, Thing, Entertainment... whatever you wish and then everyone else asks yes or no questions to try and guess what you have selected from that topic. You can only ask yes or no questions and if someone doesn't then you can't answer there question... well that was hard for everyone as they started to explain things or answer in full sentences as apposed to one word... Yes or No! Then instead of saying yes or no they would say... It's debatable... They would lose it over that one! "You can't say that either stick to an answer yes or no or don't pick something that's too hard to get!" They got all worked up about every answer and question. Needless to say it sure did pass the time. In addition to these fun afternoons of endless questions most every morning they came to work hung over from the night before. So the boss would have fun picking on them for looking like crap. We would hear all the stories of the night before which usually drunk stories don't impress me but when said in an Irish accent apparently everything is funny to me. Needless to say we totally enjoyed their company and stories and high energy and it was fun to have new people to work with. We now get the rest of the week off ~ we are not complaining as it's Thanksgiving and you guys are off for holiday so we feel like we get to do the same. We are cooking for a friend tonight and sharing Thanksgiving with her at her home. So I should probably get off this computer and get to cooking! Yikes my first Thanksgiving meal to prepare! I'm so nervous! We will let you know how it turns out!

Later Mates!