Hi everyone!!

Hope you are all ok!! Had a busy and hard working couple of days!! No sunbathing for me!!

On Wednesday monring, I headed over to Myella Farm, which is a live working cattle farm and tourists (and locals) can stay and help out at the farm!! Got an early pick up of 6.30am and 5 of us headed over!! There were 2 swedish girls, 2 girls from denamrk and myself!! Its a pretty basic farm, although did have a small outdoor pool!! When we arrived, there were kangaroos just sunbathign on the lawn!! Its a pretty huge farm space for 30 horses and over 300 cattle!! The kitchen and dining area was all outside under a pretty basic roof but really nice!!The Myella farm actually celebrated its 18th bday of housing guests on my second day, although the farm has been in the family since the 1960s. Olive and Peter, now in their 70s. still live in the main house, although they have now passed it on to their children!

First things first, we had some breakfast and then got changed into what can only be described as next seasons fashion statement!! Jeans with long sleeved men shirt and of course suede boots!! Not the best especially considering the heat and humidity (it was 34 C at 9.30am in the shade one morning!!) Anyway, once we all looked the part, it was off to the horses!! They have 30 horses there at the moment and we needed to let them all out of their pens as they had already been fed, but kept our 6 horses (the 5 of us plus Trevors, who was the guy looking after us)! I got given Barnaby who was a gorgeous horse although Travor did warn me that he has a tendancy to kick other horses! Just what you wanna hear!! After a quick practice of how to get on a horse using a metal imitation, we saddled up our own horse and headed out!! Overall, we went for a 1hr and 40min ride! It was really nice although as the farm is so big, none of us(except Travor of course) knew where the hell we were!! Once the horses had been de-saddled, washed down, brushed and set out, we had lunch!!

Lunch was amazing, had pumpkin soup and salad with cold meats!! All so good although the pumpkin soup tasted more like a korma sauce !! After lunch was the scariest part of the couple of days- learning to ride a motorbike!! We all headed over and got a crash course in riding!! Think we were all pretty scared when Trevor said, right off you go!! But he started us all of individually and was a birlliant teacher!! It wasn't long before we were all racing round the practice track!! The worst part was turning as you have to lean the bike rather than turn the handles and it felt so unnatural!! I could manage the bigger corners but the small tight ones that he tried to get us to do weren't happening!! Did manage to stand up on the bike though for some of the laps!! After he thought we were confident enough, we headed around the farm on some of the roads and built up some speed (don't worry limit was 35kph mum!!) We then headed up to Sunset point, which we could go up in the eve to if we wanted to! We did, but unfortunately we didn't see much as there were too many high clouds!!

Before the sunset though, we had the cows to milk and eggs to collect from the chickens!! We all had a go at milking the cows and it is so difficult!! You have to squeeze pretty hard and we all did ok, but Trevor put us all to shame byt filling an entire bucket in the time it took us to do a minute layer!! By the way, Trevor is about 60 odd years old and does pretty much all the hard work on the farm!! We also got to taste the freshest milk ever, straight from the cow!! To be fair, it just tasted like warm milk!! All the milk that we used ont he farm was fresh!! We also collected 16 eggs from the 3 pens of chickens!!

Dinner consisted of beef-balls in gravy, mash and fresh veg all of which was grown on the farm!! Found out the next day, that an entire cow can feed the whole farm (visitors, 4 workers and the family owners) for a month!! 30 years ago, a cow could feed a family of 5 for a year!! Anyway, we all had an early night that evening as it had been a pretty tiring day!!

Breakfast was at 7am the next morning and by 8am we were getting the cows in and getting the eggs again!! This time, I also got to feed some of the milk to one of the calves!! Very cute!! This time the chickens weren't as friendly, as they were often sat on the eggs and didn't wanna give up their eggs!! We got 10 altogether though so we were happy!!

Then it was off to the horses again, although today we needed to get them all in and feed them before we could head out!! Trevor and 2 ofg the girls went out on the bikes to coleect them all into the next field and then I moved the from the next field into the main paddock, and the other 2 then put them all into theior separate pens!! Again, I rode Barnaby, but today he had a couple of funny 5mins!! He wanted to kick or set off on a run every now and again but as long as he was at the front he seemed pretty happy (reminded me of someone on the sponsored walk!!)We were out for about 2 and a half hours and saw a few wild kangaroos!! We tried to find some wild pigs and boars but no luck!! The horses all did really well as often the grass was pretty long and the ground was very uneven!!

In the afternoon, we had my favourite activity!! Learning to crack a whip and throw a lossoo!! The 2 danish girls didn't wanna do this so it was just the 3 of us, and of course Trevor!! The whip cracking was really good once you get the hang of the technique!! Wierdly, I was better with my left arm rather than my right but we were all getting some pretty loud sounds out of them!! The lassoo-ing took a bit longer to get the hang of but in the end we all 'caught' the orange cone!!

After a cup of tea and an anzac biscuit, it was time to leave :( really gutted to leave as it had been a lovely couple of days, although I did come away with some bruises, a whip mark and plenty of insect bites!!

Anyway, headed back to Rockhampton for another evening, then today, I'm headed off to the Town of 1770, aka Agnes Water!!

Sending lots of Myella love

xxx