Back Again!
Mood:  energetic

Well here I am again after nearly 8 months of nothing to say. To date, we are still here in Newman but not for very much longer. I'll give you a very compacted update to put you in the loop so to say......

I quit driving for the bunch I was working for here in Newman, and took up an offer from the bunch I take freight to in the town of Tom Price. Same freight run, but in a brand new truck, to a much better run yard, and much more professional people, in short, a better deal all 'round. Result? Jan is happy as a pig in mud.

Easy still works for the same bunch of electrical contractors, got a nice pay rise, and is happy too.

The F Truck, (Formally known as Big Bertha) which shall now be known as "The F Word" , is FINALLY fixed and back onthe road. It took some nagging and threatening on Jan's part to get Easy to do something about it, as he was seemingly quite content to be stuck here in Newman!!!

In addition to being operational, the truck now has brand new sparkly mag wheels fitted with huge great knobby mud terrain tyres, a brand new sparkly hunungous bullbar which would stop a train, and brand new huge Lightforce spotties mounted on the bullbar too. To cap all this off, the whole shebang has been lifted by 4 inches and had new heavy duty shockies and airbags fitted. It now requires you to stand on a milkcrate to see over the bonnet!!! Doesn't seem like such a big deal to me because I drive a truck all day, but Easy is just beside himself with glee and is fully "in luuuurve" with The F Word. "More is Better" is the motto here!!

Last week we spent 8 days back in Darwin attending the wedding of a young couple we met and became mates with in Kalgoorlie. I went with a great deal of trepidation, as Easy still has quite a few old drinking buddies back there, and was raring to get there. I could think of nothing worse than being back in the heat and humidity plus having to put up with drunks all day every day.

I was proven VERY wrong by an impecably behaved Easy, who did all he could to make my holiday as enjoyable as he could., I love him for that. We had the time of our lives as we drove around like a pair of tourists trying to get our bearings again after 8 years for him and 24 years for me, of absence. We went crabbing with a very old friend who makes his living from it, and spent a most enjoyable unplanned overnight stay down at Bynoe harbour in the crabber's shack. There's nothing quite like the taste of your 1st "muddie" after 24 years, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven as I sank the fangs into a huge chunk of mudcrab claw meat while standing on the sand at high tide in the front of the shack. No one else but Easy and I ate crab as they are all sick of it......yes hard to believe, so we demolished 3 monsters between us.

Not only did we have a lovely time eating mudcrab, but the weather was also very pleasant being the "dry season" I was still breaking out into a sweat a lot, but you soon forgot about the discomfort as you drove around with the balmy breeze blowing throught the windows. The Mindil Beach markets were a must to attend, and we did the tourist thing and wandered through one Thursday evening. It's not something I would do more than very ocassionaly, but we had a good time and also sampled some truly awful food disguised as "chinese and asian" cusine. I guess we were spolit because we had a feast of the best chinese I have had since leaving Alice Springs, on the 1st night we were in Darwin.

The wedding was just lovely. A truly laidback top end affair with the groom and most of the guests arriving only moments before the event was scheduled to start! The bride looked just gorgeous and totally relaxed in her lovely dress. We enjoyed the reception too, and next day caught up with the newly weds at one of the local picnic areas near the beach.

All too soon, it was the day to return to reality and Newman, and we jumped on the plane and arrived home just after dark, to a rapturous welcome from the two adoptee pussies who spend most of their time at our place eventhough they live just across the road.

I forgot to tell you that the day we were supposed to leave Newman for Darwin, the plane developed problems and we spent a night in Perth courtesy of Qantas. This meant that our scheduled route via ALice Springs was cancelled and we flew instead via Broome and Kununurra. What a great opportunity for Easy to have a quick glimpse of his future home town, as we circled overhead! The weather was nice and balmy as we spent a quick 20 minutes at the Kununurra airport, and his curiosity about the place was well and trully whetted. (He thinks he is going to like the place). We have given our notice at each of our work places effective for the end of July, and after that, we will be heading for Kununurra to spend at least 12 months there working. Easy already has work lined up and my work (Nexus Freightlines) has a depot there and my boss is going to put in a word for me there.

So, the next Christmas card you will get from us will have a Kimberly theme no doubt, and be full of news of that part of the country.

I will post some new photos to the photo website asap so you can have a look at what we did.

Cheers for now, from Jan O & Easy

Happy Anniversary
Mood:  hungry
Guess what? I have now been in the transport industry for 12 months, and I am STILL lovin’ it! I’ve now driven approximately 220,000 ks in my truck, over the same route, and it is STILL an amazingly beautiful scene looking through that windscreen. I was particularly anxious for my Dad to like what he was about to see when I took him on a couple of freight runs through the Karijini National Park, and I wasn’t disappointed. He loved what he saw and was just as impressed with the stunning colours as I was, and remain so, even after many trips there. We must have driven damned near 600 ks most days, my Dad and I, and I was scared I had worn him out a couple of times, but he did pretty well considering he is now an octogenarian. He is right into making small documentary type films with his new video camera, and he now has many hours of material to muck around with. I have do doubt that the finished product will be well worth seeing. Easy took a couple of days off work too, and we all went up to see Marble Bar again. It is 7 months since the last time we visited the place, and it was just beginning to get really hot (around 40 some days) and the water level in the river where you see the “marble bar” itself, was way down on what we had swum in previously. Nevertheless, it was still a beautiful spot on sundown and Dad got some really nice video, and I got some more stills for my collection. We nearly had some material for “FunniestVideos” when Easy took the video camera into the water for a clip of the colours in the rock wall and spent an anxious few seconds trying NOT to fall over when he hit slime on the rocks!!!! The irony would have been that HE had the video camera and not some one else. Once again, we spent a very pleasant half hour or so having sundowners while watching the surrounding landscape soften and change colours in the hazy twilight. Lucky for us, the flies hadn’t started and so we could have nibblies as well, in complete peace. I think the pub accommodation was a bit of a shock for my urban dad…..we knew what to expect, but he was a bit gobsmacked at the lack of sophistication that we all know, and kind of expect in the  bush. Little things like…no hot water because the cold is hot enough to cook you, so why would the hot tap be worth fixing? Heaps and heaps of cobwebs and dirt in the bathroom as well as a highway of calcium scale stain down into the toilet simply because “that’s the way it is in the bush and no one here complains about it”. At least the aircon worked a treat, and the hamburgers with the lot are still a bloody good feed…..although they would pale into insignificance against the famous Mole Creek Café ones!!! Hmmmmm, now THAT’S a place I haven’t thought of for a while……5 years since the great escape from there………but I digress!After we left Marble Bar, we drove up to Port Hedland on a good bitumen road instead of returning on the awful corrugated dirt one we had just driven up on. We were all a little bit anxious because Big Bertha (our Effie) had had a bit of a hiccup and kind of stopped for a brief moment 30 ks from Marble Bar the previous day, and we didn’t know what the problem was. We still don’t know, and she hasn’t done it again, but to be sure, Easy is going to change the camshaft position sensor on it today. This is apparently a rather common problem in 7.3lt effie diesels at around the mileage it has done, and we have the part, so may as well fit it.Port Hedland proved interesting for Dad as we spent a bit of time down at the port watching the iron ore ships getting loaded. The harbour was very busy with the humungous ship, plus pilot boats, and helicopters all buzzing about. I got a photo of all three in the same shot!  After a brief tour of the town and suburbs ,we sat up next to the huge water tower over looking the sea eating chicken wings for lunch, before heading for home. I had wanted for Dad to see at least one of the huge iron ore trains which carry the stuff from Newman and the surrounding mine sites to the port, and I was well and truly blessed with train after train, and we filmed the whole passage of one coming down the tracks on a remote access road I had permission to be on, simply because I was dead sure we would see one there! It was a reasonably sized one with a configuration of 3 engines in front and 2 in the middle. I have seen bigger ones, but this one would do. Of course, wouldn’t you know it…the very week after Dad went home, the road was chokablock with oversized loads and wildlife everywhere….all the things I had hoped he would see but didn’t, due to their absence.I think he returned home tired, but glad he had come and seen where we are. He has seen an awful lot of the world, but I reckon he was mightily impressed with what this part of Australia has to offer. It’s a beautiful part of the world, harsh and unforgiving, but pretty special, and a delight to be in……during the winter months. Dad came and saw and left just before all the really nasty hot weather arrived with a vengeance. Today, Bathurst day, is really a scorcher with howling winds and the dust is swirling outside my airconditioned caravan haven. Good day to stay inside, but we are doing the washing, and cleaning the carpet squares which have once again, turned a dark pink colour from the dust infiltrating through any small crack or cranny. Fair dinkum, I leave no windows open, and have banned work boots from being worn inside even “for a little minnie” as the man of the house who doesn’t have a problem with the dirt and filth of this place, is so fond of saying!!!!.......and STILL the caravan seems to get full of dust every day! I hate Newman’s dust with a passion, and will be glad to leave for cleaner places, but we both love our jobs, and the money’s great, and we have elected to stay for at least 12 more months.To Be Continued…………………..

Summer Commeth
Now Playing: SBS on the TV
The first thing that greets me these days when I poke my head out of the caravan door is…..the fiery pink globe of the sun as it steams it’s way through the early morning cloud cover. Oh man is it going to be a hot summer!!? If only the days could remain exactly as they are now! The temps are just perfect over night…a light breeze caresses the trees, and there are no mossies as yet, and the biggest bonus of all…NO FLIES! There have been fires in the Karijini National park already, and last week the visibility was down to almost nothing one day when the smoke from fires up as far as Broome drifted down! My dear old Daddy is arriving this week for a 10 days stay and I am just hoping the hot weather will hold off long enough for him to enjoy his time here. I am getting a little bit excited about his visit, and find myself having little scenarios every day about what we will do together. He is coming on some of my freight runs in the truck, and I have asked for 5 days off work to take him to some of the places we can’t go in the truck. Work…….well, that is going through some pretty major upheavals at the moment. The huge company “Statewide” came in here and bought the whole of our little company’s interests, namely the freight runs and the sanitation business and the street cleaning business, and certain elements of the take over do not appear to sit well with the old owner and some of his old staff members, and there have been quite a few walk outs and resignations and the saddest part of all ….the alienation of the old man from his former workers and manager. Of course all the staff leaving has meant that the remaining ones have so much moire work to do to cover the absences. I am now doing the morning, and sometimes evening airport freight collection, as well as loading 3 trucks every morning. This makes for a more interesting day, but a looong one! The funny thing which seems to be emerging is that we may just end up and “all female” yard! The blokes are just sooks, and I am fed up to the back teeth with the disloyalty and the bickering and backstabbing, and just want to do my job and go home each day. Instead I am forced to listen to daily complaints and whinges from some who should be a bit more supportive of the newly appointed manager, who is clearly struggling with it all. Also, a lot of the machinery is suddenly starting to falter and methinks it could be sabotage! Even my truck, which is the best performer of the fleet, has been plagued with problems lately. All very weird. Easy and I got out to Turee Creek Station again the last days off I had. Once again, Bruce had lined up some jobs for us and this time we were water trough repairers. Both of us got to play on Bruce’s front end loader which was a lot of fun. I love driving big stuff around.  While I was sitting behind the water tank during the repairs, I was treated to the spectacle of literally thousands of little tiny zebra finches all screaming around the water in huge flocks. They would all fly in a deafening whirr of wings down to the slightest hint of moisture, and then at the slightest hint of danger, they would all take off again for the safety of the trees. At one stage, I looked over at the actual water trough, to see a long row of spinifex pigeons with their little fluffy bottoms all tipped up to have a drink. Would have made a great photo if I had the camera right there! This trip out there, I took some photos of Bart, the big black sooky dog who carries a small black teddy bear around all day, and a couple of the cats there. One of them decided that my more than ample chest was a damned fine place to rest, and as I sat in the chair in the kitchen, it climbed right up onto my lap and then slowly slowly crept up….. and curled up on my chest! We also went out to one of the beautiful water holes on the station and Easy took his hat for a swim proving that the filthy thing is actually water repellent after it survived him diving in while still wearing it! It really should be retired to a compost heap or something, as it is really quite disgusting, and it SMELLS! When he flew to Perth this week, he had to wear my nice one as I doubt they would have let him through security with it! Ahh, the trip to Perth! Yes well, that was to attend the 30^th reunion of the Christchurch Grammar Schools Old Boy’s Association. This was held at the Claremont yacht club no less, and apparently was a great success. He stayed with another of the old school mates, and they didn’t retire until well after 3am. He sounded a bit snuffly when I rang him the next day, and that is a dead give away to me, that he got a bit untidy the night before! I must have been awake in synchro with him that night, as I tossed and turned all night and felt like crap the next day! Didn’t help that this was the night of the moron ball grand final and all the locals were playing up all night around here! He went shopping for boy stuff while he was in Perth, and the F truck got a whole pile of goodies bought for it. I have used my days off this fortnight to catch up on all the cleaning again! This place is REALLY starting to give me the heabie jeebies with all the never ending red dirt swirling around! I forgot to close ONE window in the van the other day and when I got home everything was COVERED in dust! AAAAGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! I have even got the dreaded Pilbara tan happening to myself! Yep…..you guessed it folks! The red stain of iron oxide is making me look permanently half cooked! Oh yeah, and the willy willies have started for the summer already. I got home just after a huge one had all but torn up the caravan park the other afternoon, and our awning was looking a bit saggy, but intact, but the satellite dish had apparently walked out to the middle of the road until it reached the end of the lead attaching it to the van!  There was crap every where, and the annexe was knee deep in leaf litter and dirt and the deck chairs were all awol for a bit. Glad I had remembered to close all the windows tight THAT day!One good thing which comes out of dusty days is the sunsets! Oh man are they beautiful! I have nearly given up taking photos of them because you can just get carried away. I just think that the one I am looking at is THE most beautiful one I have ever seen, the next night I see one which blows even the previous one away! I might just make a photographic book of all the sunsets one day…………………To Be Continued………………….. 

Birthday Bash
Mood:  happy
Birthdays and such like are so much fun aren’t they?! Here I am sitting in the Hilton Hotel in Melbourne wondering if I am dreaming or what! My baby has just turned 30!!!!!!!! How old do you think I feel today?? Well, not too shabby actually, and certainly not as shabby as the birthday boy himself feels. He said he actually feels worse today than he did yesterday after his party.The gathering was, as expected, fairly full on, and all over in a flash. Christy, my son in law Tant, and I all converged on Melbourne on Friday night, grabbed a hire car and hot footed it down to Danny’s place on the Mornington peninsula where he lives. By the time we all got there it was pretty late, but time means nothing when you’re having fun right!?Actually, we could all still be there in the car park!! Embarrassment all ‘round when we couldn’t get the park brake off in the flash-as-Michael-Jackson hire car! MON DIEU! Luckily, “the Mother” had seen similar arrangements in her boss’s flash car, and Tant, the ever practical man that he is, actually read the manual, located the  activator and got us out of the place! The driver, Christy, will NEVER live this moment down (we couldn’t possibly let her!) and we all gave her heaps for a while after that. She…clever girl, had thought of asking for a vehicle with an inbuilt navigator system, and what a godsend that was! Was fun listening to the plummy British voice gently instructing us country hicks where to turn next and every now and then we would deliberately take a wrong turn to see what “she” would tell us next. Very patiently she would guide us back onto the right path, and amidst much hilarity, we would arrive at the correct destination. We all agreed that we had to get one in our own cars.Back to the birthday……….Un be known to Danny, his partner Kylie had arranged for us all to throw in to a “keyboard for the muso” fund, and we raised enough money for him to buy the keyboard of his dreams. His face was an absolute picture when he was presented with a giant gift certificate at his birthday bash, surrounded by about 30 friends and family members. To say he was a bit stunned is not really doing justice to the scene, but you can imagine. We all reckon he will be camped outside the music shop, nose pressed against the glass door, waiting for it to open!  Strangely enough, he just happened to have a great swag of information on the keyboard he wanted, so we all got to have a look at what the new gear will look like. I love surprises, so it was really nice to see the expressions on his face. He hasn’t been able to “gig” for ages because his old keyboard is well past it’s used by date, and because these things are so expensive…….well…..all that’s in order now!Of course, seeing the Grand kiddlies was a bonus as well! Christy had not seen the littlest one Joel as yet, so she was more than taken aback by the stunning resemblance to his own daddy at the same age (3). Those two just clicked and she spent a great deal of time playing with him much to his delight. Miss Mikayla is going to be a real heartbreaker AND definitely give her dad some moments when she gets old enough for the boys to notice her! At 7 years of age, she is a tall willowy good looker already and a real firecracker in the personality department. She takes after her dad, whereas Joel is more placid like Kylie, his mummy. They are two great kids, and just sitting back and observing them took me straight back to my days with Dan and Christy as children. Speaking of such things, Christy made a beautiful dvd of Danny’s life from birth to present day, using photos and a sound track to produce a slide show of it all. I was blubbering before the first scene had faded, and the 6 foot tall man mountain was actually pretty teary himself! She did a great job whizzer! All too soon it was time to make the trek back to the airport and we were seasoned gps-ers by the time we delivered the car back to the depot……….only to find we had forgotten to fuel it up….talking too much weren’t we eh!? Back out to fill her up, and find our way back into the labyrinth of the airport. I am so glad I don’t live in places like these…everyone seems like a mouse on a wheel rushing around. Give me the wide open spaces every time. Actually Dan and Kylie are contemplating moving on from Melbourne as they reckon they have had enough.  I don’t blame them! Back to work tomorrow for me. It will all seem like it didn’t happen by this time next week. The next big event will be for Easy, when he goes to Perth for the 30 year reunion of his year at boarding school. No doubt at all that there will be some very sore heads after THAT one! To be continued……………….

Pilbara Pilgrimages
We’ve been up to quite a lot since I last updated the log. Our usual activities on the rare day off a fortnight that we get to spend together, took a turn for the better last month. We headed up the road to Port Hedland for a couple of days with some old Alice Springs mates who had been living in Hedland, and were about to move back to Streaky Bay where they have a home. It was great to finally catch up with Chris and Geoff, even if it was to say farewell again. We knew we should have made the trip a lot sooner, but work always seemed to get in the way, plus Hedland is not the most pleasant place to be in summer. The recent cyclone had done significant damage to the trees around the town, and we could see signs of it almost everywhere we looked. Of course the near proximity to the sea was enough to start the yearning looks from Mr Sanders, so we simply HAD to make a visit to some mangrove swamps for him to get a taste of what we has been missing since leaving Darwin, and also for the sandflies to have a munch on poor Chris as soon as she set foot outside the car! If there’s one thing I don’t miss, it is all the critters of the tropics that want to feed off you! Would have been mighty fine of we could go crabbing, but that will have to wait until WE have our tinnie one day. We also hit the shops and bought a few things which are sadly lacking here in Newman…….most things that is!!! We now have a DVD recorder to take the place of the VCR……and it would be great if only I could install it correctly! Once again, I have to enlist the services of a “geek” to do something which should be so easy! We had a really good look around the housing as we could not get over the ludicrous rentals being demanded and paid. A really average house now fetches well over $800-$1000.00 per week in rent, and to buy one, you need to have either won lotto or be related to a millionaire. And forget trying to get a place at the local caravan park! They really should place a sign up at the entrance to the town saying “No Vacancies” as there really is nothing available. “Why is this?” you ask? Well, it’s all because of the mining boom and all the people coming to these places, and the lack of housing for them all. In Newman, there are whole housing villages popping up like mushrooms literally overnight, and it is set to happen in Hedland, but the boom seems to have caught them by surprise or something. Any way, we had a really nice day and a half with Chris and Geoff, and we will definitely make the effort to catch up with them at Streaky in the future.More work, in the meantime, before we took up another invitation to visit, this time from Bruce and Suzanne at Turee Creek Station, south west of Paraburdoo. Remember in the previous blog how I explained that Easy had done some electrical work for them out on the station, and how Bruce seemed to take a liking to Easy and issued the invite? So, on the next available day off, we both took two days off, and drove out to the station. There’s something about station people and the life, and the actual countryside which I find gives me a refresher on life. I always feel like I am “coming home”, even to a place I have never been to before! True to Easy’s description of him, Bruce was, indeed a real rough diamond, whom I immediately took a liking to. He hates the general public with a passion, and shares most of our opinions of them, so we all got on famously straight away! His wife Suzanne is quite a bit younger than him, but equally as likeable, and she and I shared some deep thoughts on life in general over many, many cuppas. They have a love of animals equalled only by ours, and the place is home to quite a few cats, and a couple of dogs, guinea fowl, geese, retired ponies, a brumby, and an assortment of grown pet cattle, who will end their days peacefully on the station, knowing that they will NEVER be food for anyone under any circumstance. This causes Bruce to roll his eyes and sigh in exasperation and to declare that the place will be over run with freeloaders, and there won’t be any room for money making stock soon!The dogs are a whole story on their own…………the little dog, “Lucy”, is a perfect replica of the “His Masters Voice” Jack Russell , complete with the patch over one eye, and she is a real character. I don’t normally take to Jacks much, but she is a real dag of a dog. The big dog, “Bud” is a cross between a black Labrador and a Rottweiler and looks for all the world like Baloo the Bear, complete with the droopy sad looking eyes and the loud sighs as he shuffles around. He’s a huge lump of a lad, and always seems to be lying right where you want to walk, but YOU have to go around HIM! He is a real sweety, but apparently if he takes a dislike to any other dogs or what ever, then look out! I would hate to be on the wrong side of him. Now picture this…..the huge black bear-like dog, wandering around with …….a small black stuffed teddy bear in his mouth like a dummy! Yep! Bud will not be parted from his teddy and lies down with it between his paws and actually cuddles it.  A year or so ago, Bruce and Suzanne and two of their daughters came home from a shopping trip into Newman, to find Bud in the kitchen staring fixedly at the freezer. They all thought “snake” and moved the freezer out from the wall while standing by with the shotgun, and there was a tiny feral kitten. Guess who had brought it home from the bush? Bud had….and he mothered it so much that none of the kids was allowed more than 3 minutes playing with it before he would gently take it back in his huge mouth and place it in his “nest” he had made in some blankets in a shed, and he would also carry it around in his mouth like a mother cat. One day no one knew where the kitten was, and they said “Bud where’s your kitty?” and he opened his mouth and out plopped a very bedraggled kitten. So, “Bud’s kitty” grew up thinking she was a dog, until one day she just got sick of being carried around and gave him a slap over the nose every time he went to pick her up. Quite broke his heart apparently! There is a black one who is a bit flighty, but Easy had it coming up to him by day two, and a ginger one called “Fred” who took to putting his paws up around my neck and just cuddling me if I stopped in front of where he would be sitting on any bench, and two perfect pairs of tabby ones. Each night would be a sea of cats all clambering over each other to be first in line for tucker at the bench.They have a brumby two year old who lives up top his name of “Shadow” as he is never further than two inches away from you at any time. He is so clever, this little horse, that Bruce had to modify the latches on the gates three times before he outsmarted Shadow. They couldn’t work out how come he was always in the house yard, until they stood and watched him nuzzle and lip at the latches until he opened them, and so now everyone just climbs over the fences and never uses the gates because it takes so long to undo all the things which have to be in place to outsmart Shadow! Now, Easy loves horses, but has no concept of what they can do to a person if they are frightened or unbroken, so off he went as we all stood around chatting, and climbed up onto Shadow and proceeded to ride him around! Suzanne said “Hmmmmm, this could get interesting! Shadow has never had a person on his back before!” Apart from turning his head so sniff at the strange object on his back, he was just fine, and clomped around after Suzanne as she fed all the chooks and birds. Shadow thinks he is a dog, and tries to go into all the feed sheds etc, so Easy had to make a classy side step off onto the fence before he got wiped off in a door way! Bruce needed a hand to fix a windmill, which we willingly gave, and also he wanted to go and get a killer (heifer for meat) because he wasn’t happy with the quality of the half a side of beef hanging in the cool room. WE thought it was wonderful, as we feasted on bbq’d steak that night. I guess you do tend to get a bit spoilt when you can actually go out and choose your own beast! So Bruce is suitably impressed with us methinks, because he and Suzanne both asked us when we were coming back! Maybe the fact that Easy did all the hard yakka on the windmill, and sharpened Bruce’s meat knives to a razor edge, helped butcher the heifer, and fixed Suzanne’s washing machine all had something to do with it……but we like to think that they liked us as much as we liked them. Felt like we had known them for years by the time we left. We had to leave early as it had started raining, and the red bull dust roads very quickly turned to skating rinks as we found out when we started the drive home. Of course we had to take some shots of Big Bertha powering through the bulldust, and didn’t young Easy have a lovely time hooning around over and over until I got the right shots!?Back to work……..I have a cold and feel a bit lousy, so I took a day off and just caught up on all the washing and cleaning I hadn’t done because we were out visiting! We have also been going out to a few bbqs for tea as Easy gets invited to various work mate’s places. It’s interesting meeting new folks who all have the same thing in common as you do….mining work. I will miss the interaction once we leave the industry, as they are a unique bunch of people.To be continued……………..

Perfect Pilbara Winter Days
Sunday 3^rd June Ahhhh! Winter in the Pilbaras…………..beuuutiful! Just like the days in Alice used to be with brilliant blue skies, clear freezing nights, and warm comfy days. Of course we once again are experiencing that strange sound which seems to get louder and louder each winter…..what could it be? Oh YEAH…..it’s Easy complaining about the cold! Silly me, how could I forget THAT sound? Poor chap, he really does feel it badly and it gets worse each year. He is wearing the thermal gloves to work each day, well, he is on the pushbike at 5.30am, so it IS a bit nippy. However, I think it is finally sinking in that maybe he would not be so cold if he wore more clothes, and at least proper shoes at night when we go out! We went to a bbq birthday party last night and Easy wore his new sneakers for the 1^st time! Very noice they were too! We had a good time and enjoyed the company even if we did smell like blackfellas afterwards, from huddling around the fire to keep warm. Today was a day off for us both after 12 day’s continuous working, and Easy pottered around with the Ftruck, fitting a UHF radio to it, and finishing off some electrical work he had started on it a while ago. He managed to stop the completely irritating warning ding ding ding alarm which sounds when you open the door, or put the key in the ignition or don’t fit your seatbelt or ANYTHING!!! It is truly a maddening sound! You almost expect to hear the hostess say “Welcome to the Sandhills airlines, your destiny today is Newman shopping centre. Please place your trays in the upright position and turn off all mobile phones.” AAGGHHHH!!!We want to get the drawer system fitted to it soonish, because we can’t sell the  Cruiser until all the tools and crap Easy has stored in it, are relocated to the Ftruck. He also wants to lift it another 4 inches so he can fit larger tyres to it. The ones which are standard are silly little things which don’t give you much clearance at all. One day does not give you any time at all to do anything much, but there ya go. We will probably make the effort to get up to Pt Hedland next day off. Easy was supposed to be working straight through again this week, but I reminded him he was only human and he needed to take a break, and besides, it is the rules that you cannot work more than 13 days with out taking a break. The bosses love him! He just works and works. I was looking forward to pottering around the few shops we do have here, until some one reminded me that today is a public holiday (Monday 4^th) so I can only do domestic stuff all day at home. Oh well, the web log did need up dating. We are a very busy little caravan park now it is tourist season. Each day we have a new set of neighbours for the night, and they all can’t get over the mad bird lady (me) who has the galahs feeding out of her hand. My boys and girls fly down to meet me each day and yesterday they were a bit nervous, because the man who was camped next to us, insisted on rushing over to see the birds as soon as they arrived on my clothes line to have some seed out of their dish. Consequently, I was bitten three times on the same finger by my tamest birdie friend because he was so worried about this silly man. Yes I know….”Why does she keep feeding the bird if it bites her?” Well, he normally has a quiet little feed from my hand while no one else is around, but he was eating as fast as he could yesterday in case he had to fly away from the man, and my finger must have looked good! Bloody heck it didn’t half hurt! Bleeding and bruised I was!!! But I didn’t flinch and he had a good feed, and the man was happy he got some photos of the event. Oh you should hear the choice comments from the truckies each day on the uhf radios about the stupid caravanning tourists on the road!! Would burn your ears honestly, and makes me be ashamed to be a caravanner. Mind you, they are pretty stupid with some of the things they do on the road. I was left shaking my head in disbelief the other day, and wondering if I was going to be administering 1^st aid sooner rather than later when they had an accident. If only the general public could just take a ride in a heavy vehicle sometimes to see it from the truckie’s perspective, then they would not do half the stupid things they do! I had to shake my head the other day at the antics of a bunch of great unwashed on motorcycles heading my way. The lead riders were actually swerving into my lane and then sitting right on the white line as they roared past me. I would have been left with a red splat across the front of my truck had they wobbled at the last moment! I caught up with them all having a bbq at one of the rest stops on my way home, and had I been a bit brave, I should have pulled up and asked which one of the morons thought it was so funny to do that?Still loving my job driving. The agency in Tom Price where I deliver my load to, has been taken away from the arrogant Irish %#* who I had to deal with and from the 11^th I will be delivering to a much nicer bunch of blokes right next door to the old place there. I can’t wait! I always thought Irish were supposed to be happy go lucky people…not this one. He is a real bog irish pig and the yard is happiest when he is not there. OUR yard, on the other hand, is always happy and we all get on well. Easy is also enjoying his work place and mates there. The other day his boss actually rang him up from where he was (the boss was away somewhere other than Newman) to ask him if he was happy to work up on the hill at Mt Whaleback for a week? Wow! Yes Easy was happy and thanks for asking! Most places would just tell you that’s where you are going! They really look after the boys in that place, and they are nice blokes too. I took the bosses son home the other night from the yard when they had all had a skinful, and he was like a little kid sitting in the back going “Oh wow, I am sitting in a Sherman TANK!” and he rang his wife to tell her to wait out the front of the house to see us coming down the road! Good grief how embarrassment Effie! Easy had the job of wiring up some air conditioners out at a station north of here the other week, called Turrey Downs. Of course this was RIGHT up his alley and he hot footed it out there and had a very nice time nattering to the station owner as well. This bloke was apparently quite an old crusty who is happiest out in the bush (sound like someone else we know?) and they had quite a lengthy chat over a beer or two after work, and of course Easy has made a new friend and has an open invitation to come out any time he likes. They were about to start the muster and poor Easy was just hanging out to join in, but had to come back to Newman. Well, we know where we can go to have our station fix now! He also had to go out to one of the newest mines around here called “Cloudbreak” and he took some very nice photos of sunrise over the mine, which you can see on the photos web site.Getting excited because we are both going to be doing something different soonish……I am going to fly to Melbourne for a couple of days in August to celebrate my son’s 30^th birthday with him, and his sister and husband from Tassie (custodians of our big Whizz black cat we left there) and then Easy will be flying to Perth in September for the 30^th anniversary reunion of his class of 77 from boarding school. Stay tuned folks!To Be Continued…………………..  

Wittenoom Wanderings
We both scored a Sunday off work last weekend, and because the weather has cooled down a lot and the flies have mostly buggered off, we decided to explore the country a bit north of here. The old ghost town of Wittenoom is only a 2 hour drive away and because it is frowned upon as a place to visit due to the asbestos health worry, we naturally decided that this was THE place to visit! No, we are not being stupidly irresponsible, but when a Govt. basically closes a town and tears down its buildings and tries to hide the fact that a place ever existed, then THAT tends to whet the appetite a little bit! Wittenoom was quite a bustling mining town in the early days, and is situated in some stunningly beautiful country, which has all but reclaimed the place where the town once stood. You have to look very carefully in some places to see where buildings once stood, and we both really wished we could travel back in time to see what was obviously a very busy mine site down in the valley. The haul road from the asbestos mine defies gravity as it claws its way around the very edge of a very steep hill, and you have to remember, there was no where near the safety measures used in those days as is now. The mining personnel camp appears to have been situated right on a river bend, and in one spot, we noticed a beautiful piece of stone work, being a very large rectangular shaped raised wall. This may be all that remains of either a hospital, or the mess, or something else equally large and of some importance in the camp. On each side of the rectangle, there is a set of stairs built, again, of rock, recessed into the wall. I did not take any photos of this because it was too hard to get a good shot of it. Maybe when we return there I will, because it has been playing on my mind ever since, as to what it may have been. The whole area had lots of bougainvillea trees and date palms and cedar trees planted around, and gave the place that “lived in” feel you get in country gardens. We basically had the whole place to our selves, and enjoyed a picnic lunch down by a lovely clear pool at the base of a rock wall, which , we discovered, was just around the corner from the tailings heap from the old asbestos mine. The tailings are still visible as a large blueish slide of material forming a mountain, and they will probably be there for many years yet. We could see very large fish swimming around in the water, and they looked like bream of some sort. It was almost warm enough to swim, but the fact that the place was once an asbestos mine, kind of put us off actually immersing ourselves in the water in case of contamination. Easy managed to find a nice specimen of rock containing a vivid blue band of asbestos material…..the collection of “stuff” is off and running again! (I will disappear it later when he has forgotten about it)…..no I am not being mean, just remembering that we have a limit to how much weight we can carry about!Back in the remains of the town, there was a fascinating little gem shop, full of interesting photos of the place in its’ heyday, and we spent a bit of time in there. Easy bought me some nice ironstone and amethyst earrings, which I promptly managed to break the 1^st time I wore them…flicking a fly away, I flicked one earring right off my ear and couldn’t find it until the next day, and it had been run over by the truck at work….that will teach me to try to be a lady truckie, wearing nice earrings to work!We left Wittenoom, and drove around through the Karijini National Park via Hammersley gorge, which is the reverse way to the direction I take through there each day for work. While we were in the Hammersley Gorge, I spied two people busily scribbling their names on the rock face!!!!!! I challenged them, and got told to “Get a life…we are just having fun!” I was so angry I had to leave, or possibly do them bodily harm. They were SO blatant! I took their number plates from the vehicle I thought might be theirs, intending to report them to the rangers, but after having a good think about it, I decided that unless I had proof, then no one would believe me. Just amazes me how many think it is acceptable to do this! I was relating this story to my hairdresser the next week, and SHE stunned me by blithely stating that she used to do it all the time too! “No harm in it.” She said…………I just shut up after that…too angry to say anything, and besides, she had my hair in her hands…it wouldn’t do to start abusing her would it?Big Bertha performed very well during the trip. It was like travelling 1^st class after going economy all this time! The only issue we had was with her willingness to just keep going after throttling off, especially over the rocks in the river crossings, of which there were many. Easy was saying stuff like “Whoa big girl! Gee she’s hard in the mouth!” He is used to the engine braking in the Cruiser…..there is none of that in the Effie. We picked up a handy hint from some one regarding that……put the vehicle into 4wd without locking in the hubs, and you will get better engine braking.Driving back through the national park right on dusk was a beautiful experience. I don’t usually see it so late in the day. By the way, thank you to all of you who showed your appreciation of my photos. Gave me a real buzz to know that they are pleasing to the eye…and not just mine! Some credit has to go to Easy for his fine photography in this case…..Hammersley Gorge was his shot. In answer to a query….the pyramid hill was actually a natural occurrence.Next trip will most likely be north again…we have to take advantage of the cool weather to explore up there. There are quite a few gorges yet to be explored.To Be Continued……….

She's Here!!!
Mood:  happy
The big girl has finally arrived!!!! Last night, after a 13 hour drive up from Perth, Easy pulled into the space behind our van normally adequate for the Cruiser, and was still hanging out at the back into the street with our big Rocketgocmobile!!! He looked just like a small boy sitting up behind the wheel. She is HUGE! In the night light she was certainly all shiney and the inside was all leather and sparkly highly polished woodgrain etc etc! It was very nice to have them both home, and he was soon unpacking all the goodies he had bought whilst down in the big smoke. Actually, he didn't do too bad for a bloke who normally hates shopping and crowds. I recieved a new clothes line, and a windscreen heat shield for my truck (now I can look just like a real trucker...they all have them to shield their hands from the hot sun as they drive) and some Jim Beam and he also bought a bottle of Glayver for us to toast with (YUM) and some new shirts and sneakers for himself...yes, they are ALL either black or dark blue or both!!He hasn't changed. A sticker for the big girl to sport somewhere...."THERE'S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR CUBIC INCHES." Love that one........and some rear seats for the Cruiser to replace the ones we left back in Melbourne when we removed them to put a drawer system in. Cheaper to do it this way.
I want to take her for a drive, but I am not quite ready to. Silly I know, but there ya go. I have the day off because the Tom Price freight yard which I deliver to is having the day off. I find this an insult seeing as he is a bloody IRISHMAN and an arsehole as well!
It's been raining for a day or so and so the flies are horrendous and it's actually a bit cold! I am going to watch movies today and relax.
To Be Continued..........

Our New Work horse
Mood:  happy

Well, Easy is currently down in Perth collecting our F350 Lariat!!!! Yes folks we have finally made the big move, and gone up in power. For some time we have been very aware that the van was slowly killing the Toyota, and we needed to get something with a lot more power, and the obvious choice was a big F truck. We, how ever, were not prepared to go backwards in the comfort factor, and the brazillian made fords seemed to lack the niceties that the Toyotas have, so we waited.........and waited......and the 350 Lariat, full import, with leather and woodgrain interior seemed the choice. We got a nice one from a bloke in Perth who has buckets of money, and wanted one with a sunroof, so he simply put ours away in a shed for ages, until we found it, and now it's got a new home here! It's 6 years young, in really good nick, and has a great big tradesman's canopy, custom built and airconditioned, on the back. Easy will have heaps of room for all his crap, er, stuff that men seem to need to collect, and when we have saved up enough, we will order the new 22 foot Bushtracker to keep travelling on in. This was the primary reason for getting a bigger tow truck in the 1st place, and I am very excited at the prospect of having another go at designing our new home. I have so many different ideas for the new one, and stuff I had no idea about, the 1st time around, seems like such an obvious addition!

He is still in Perth, and is using the time to do a bit of shopping, and to see his Mum, and sisters, and to have a bit of a break from work, although this is proving hard for the little work-a-holic. He is tending to get a bit itchy about not earning while he is down there. Never mind...he will get used to it. Once he is back, the firm he works for may be going over to Coral Bay onthe coast for 10 week's work, and he will get some fabulous fishing in on his days off. That will make him feel better...fishing AND earning money.

Meanwhile, I am still really enjoying my driving job. It was the boss's 60th birthday party last night, and we all totally surprised him with a big dinner party which included his brother and sister, whom he was totally unprepared to see! They are all from the farming area of WA and don't get together much. He was a bit teary, and this was really kind of nice to see in such an old crusty. I took video and photos, and I will now make a few cds and movies for the family to take back to their homes.

Have to work on my day off on Monday as there was too much freight for my truck last week, and it has to get delivered. I am going in to a place I haven't been to before, so that will be a bit of an adventure. Also, the TNT agent up in Tom Price is changing hands, so I will get to meet some new people in about a month. The usual ones were not on very good terms with our lot, and relations were always a bit strained between them, although, after learning how to handle these wankers, I got on ok with them.

Weather report.....cooling down, still stinkingly humid (like that description do ya?) and the sunsets are starting to get really beautiful. Winter skies are always spectacular. More pictures are on the web site...these are of the new truck, plus some more Marble Bar ones ,but the internet is so slow lately that it almost is impossible to do anything, let alone upload photos. We had some rain overnight...all three minutes of it. Made things more humid, that's about all. Currently it's windy and sunny, and the flies!!!! If we thought they were bad at Ayers Rock, then we were not going to believe them here! I wear a bush bride veil at work, and do NOT give a toss about the stupid comments.........can't stand extra protein with my meals!

Gotta go. hope you like the photos, and you are well as we are.

To Be Continued........................

Easter In Marble Bar
Mood:  lazy

It does seem like a very long time since I was last chatting, and upon checking the date, I find I was about to update you all on the aftermath of the cyclones north of here! Pretty old news now, so I won't bore you with many details except to say that the rain they brought was very welcome and has made a huge difference to the National Park (Karijini) which I drive through daily. The humidity has been pretty hard to bear with though. I must be getting aclimatised because one morning at 7am while I was waiting for my load to arrive, I was actually shivering with the cool morning temperature (16) BUT also the sweat was pouring out of me too! Madness!

So, now the temps are getting a lot more pleasant at around 30 during the day and a very chilly (for us) 6 at night! There was a bit of a scramble for coats the other morning when it was drizzling rain, and poor Easy was his usual winter self.......almost frozen to a halt and mumbling about warmer places to be. I can't wait for proper winter here when it gets to minus temps! YAAAYYY!!!

Easter was spent this year travelling to the hottest town in Australia...Marble Bar. The place has that distinction after suffering over 160 days continuous , of the temps being over 100 degrees on the old scale. In actual fact then temps were around 120 and hotter. The town itself is nothing out of the ordinary, excepting they have a very nice local stone building for the council offices, and it has stood the test of time, having been built in the 1800's and still looks like new.

We took off around 6am Easter Sunday with 3 people from our group of neighbors here in the park, and drove north for 6 hours or so over some pretty rough dirt road. Part of it is actually the same road I use to come out of the Yandi mine when I do the samples run each 2nd week end. It was nice to see what is beyond the horizon, and there was some really spectacular country to see, with lovely breakaway country about 2 hours into the trip. Of course I went crazy with the camera, and got some great photos as you will see if you go to the photos web site. We arrived at some water over the road and decided to have smoko there, but as we were following the other vehicle, they were already all out and walking in the water when we came roaring over the hill, and saw them there. The devil in me prompted me to egg Easy on to drive through the water at speed and it was a very funny sight to see them all racing for cover as they realised what we were going to do! A wall of water gave them all a good wash, and to their credit, they found the funny side of it, and we all had a laugh. Easy decided the water looked too good to resist, and there is a photo of him sitting in the creek, with beer of course, looking a bit "special". We arrived just on lunchtime at the "Iron Clad" hotel, our lodging for the night, and retired to one of the 3 rooms we had booked for an absolute feast of prawns and crayfish and salads. No, we didn't get this feast at the hotel, we brought it with us as we were not sure what time we would get there. One of the friends from the park is the Wollworths deli manager and she gets all the bargain seafood!!! The outside temp was showing 40.6 on the electronic display in the park, but it didn't really feel like it was that hot, and we had good airconditioners in the rooms. Had a great steak burger for dinner courtesy of the pub, and rocked and bopped to the juke box until bedtime. Next morning, there was not a soul stirring in the thriving metropolis of Marble Bar, and no possible prospect of breakfast being provided by the management, so we packed our selves off down to the Chinaman's water hole which we had discovered the previous evening, and ate leftover crayfish for breaky!

Maybe I should tell you all about the previous evening and what we did! Well, we went down the road until we discovered the famous "marble" of Marble Bar. It's actually a rock called Jasper, and is very colourful and stripey in huge deposits down at the Coongaran River. Normally this river bed is dry or very nearly so, but the cyclones which ripped through the area a couple of weeks ago, have given the river a new lease of life and it was flowing pretty well. Shades of my days in Alice Springs when the Todd river would flow and we would all get down and dirty in the water as it flowed! The difference was the water here was clean and you could actually see underwater! I took some lovely reflection shots over the course of two hours, and when we ventured down to Chinaman's Pool, we discovered 3 nice looking horses grazing on the little grass covered flat next to the water. Of course the horse whisperer was out of the car in a flash, not listening to my warnings that he should be a bit cautious as they may be not friendly. The horses actually had their heads inside the car as he was pulling up, so that theory was not a very good one any way! He was cuddling one of them and she seemed to put up with him to the point where he was going to get on her...not good...so he changed his mind. They were in very good nick, quite young, and looked like they had a lot of thoroughbred in them if not entirely.

We also toured all around looking at the old Comet Gold Mine museum a small distance out of town. The talk is that it may well open up again as there is still gold in them thar hills, so we might just look at getting some shares. The museum was interesting, but the curator had zero interest in talking to us, so we didn't stay all that long. We went up a hill on a good 4 wheel drive sort of road until we got to a look out with a huge flying fox cable travelling from one side of the gorge tothe other. What it would have transported over the river is anybody's guess, but it was quite a substantial setup. Next stop was at the jasper pit to sample some of the striking looking striped rock stewn all around the area. Easy was like a mountain goat climbing right up the side of the hill (in his thongs of course, no hiking boots for this fella!) and bringing back some very nice specimens. More weight for the caravan! An old war time air field was also about 35ks away from the town, so we decided to have a look at what is touted as "Australia's Best Kept Secret Invisible Airfield". What a disappointment when we finally got there! Nothing but a straight track through some scrub, and a bit of a concrete slab, and that's about it. This airfield was the one the Japs were supposed to be trying to find to bomb in WW2 when they were active around Darwin. Couldn't find it, so it was dubbed "invisible" by the media. The 70k drive was nice, but we could have saved ourselves the fuel if we had known there was nothing there to see!

We then decided we better make moves to go home, and after trundling back to the sleeping town ship of Marble Bar yet again, and buying a very soggy sausage roll for lunch at the one business open, the roadhouse, seeing as we had run out of prawns and crayfish by this stage, we turned for home. We disturbed a little dingo trying to have a drink at one of the many small creek crossings, and he was so concerned with looking over his shoulder as he ran, that he just kept running straight up the middle of the road. Would not have stood a chance if we had a rifle in the car! Saw lots of budgies and quarrian parrots and heaps of the little bronzed spinifex pidgeons which insisted on running off the road instead of flying...made for some close calls at times! The cattle were all fat as mud, and we spent about 10 minutes watching a couple of young bulls fighting on the side of the road. They were really hammering each other, and would have ended up with very sore heads the next day!

Night fall, and we were just coming into Newman when we saw heaps of cop lights and flashing red ones, and thought there might have been a bad accident. It was a relief to find out that it was only an oil spill across the road leading into Newman itself, so no  deaths here over Easter.

Hope you all had as nice a break as we did. Jan got to have Tuesday off as well as Sunday and Monday because there was no freight movement, but it is back to the trucking on Wednesday.

To Be Continued..............................................