It was a long, hard summer harvesting but it is now over and we have left the farm for the very last time and Texas is now far behind us. The last stretch that we did lasted for just under two months and with the hours being a lot longer than they were when we were doing the zucchinis, we were very much looking forward to getting back into travelling mode.

The tomato season began on March 13th with 5:30am starts out in the paddock each morning, but we did at least get Saturday's off unlike the previous zucchini outing, and we would leave the packing shed at the end of the work between five and six o'clock in the evenings. When we could muster the energy we would take the bikes out for a ride down the road after work, but we were limited by the light and our own fatigue from getting up so early!

Each morning around 10:30 Ray would drive the Ute up and down between the blocks while I lifted the buckets and buckets and buckets of tomatoes onto the back of the tray, while the others carried on picking for an hour or so longer until we had five or six Ute loads worth of tomatoes in these huge crates, ready to be put onto the packing belt. The work was much the same as the previous zucchini picking we had done, except that the packing was more structured with everyone having their own little workstations along the conveyor belt machine thingy. It was Chris's job to pick out the bruised and damaged tomatoes that would be used to feed the cattle and then it was my job to sort them out into firsts and seconds - a role best described as quality control supervisor, a highly sought after and respected job! Then they moved up to Grace and Michelle who had to grade them into colours before they moved down onto the final stretch where they were automatically sorted into different boxes according to their size. This is where Ray, Kathy and Jen worked as they sorted out any mistakes and put the full boxes on to the rollers, where Neville would do the final weighing and adjusting before putting the boxes onto the appropriate pallet. The most difficult aspect of the job was knowing whether to use the guidelines set by Ray or by Kathy as they both seemed to have very different views on what was acceptable as Ray tried to send almost anything through!

Every lunchtime Ray and Kathy would go inside the house while we stayed outside to eat and after a while Jen started to get a sweet from Kathy every day when they came back out. Kathy would always try to be quite subtle about it, but when their daughter Katrina was back on holiday from school helping out, she would just walk up to Jen and hand it to her, much to Neville and Michelle's shock and quiet rage and our amusement! When work was finished each day, Kathy would bring out tea, coffee and biscuits, and sometimes cake, for everyone for the afternoon smoko and we would all sit around for a while enjoying the rest. I would always go for the pink cup as it was the right size for the perfect cup of tea with optimum sugar and milk ratios, and after a while everyone knew not to try for that cup or they would feel my wrath!

Away from work, we acquired a rather scary insight into the world of Neville and Michelle and their family life in all its glorious technicolour. As well as Chris, they had two more kids - Jennifer, 6 and Brendon, 5 and sometimes (more often than we'd care to remember actually) it was like living in the twilight zone! Most of the time the kids were great and we spent more than a few hours playing with them, doing the "Can You Find…" books with them and even teaching Jennifer how to read and spell. Brendon required little more than to be picked up to keep him happy but more often than not this all proved too much for Michelle and there were numerous occasions when we would hear her screaming at Jennifer telling her she's got all week to learn how to read the book and to stop asking her for help. Sad but true.

Now, Michelle was nice enough to us so don't want to be too harsh here but Christ she was dumb!! Shouting and screaming about anything and everything was the norm, especially to the kids, but some of the things she came out with were nothing short of ludicrous and the following are just a select few of our favourites:

- She was talking about a girl getting more money in her job than Neville was getting on the farm and she proceeded with "…and she's younger then Neville. I think she is. Yeah, I'm sure she's younger than Neville." Nothing wrong there normally. Only problem…. She was talking about Neville's daughter!!!

- On the phone to her mum "…I've got an appointment at the beginning of May. I think it's May. Maybe it's March. I'm not sure now. No, I'm pretty sure it was May not March…" The conversation taking place in the second week of April!!

- When asking where her packet of cigarettes - Brandons - was we joked that it was early for Brendon to start smoking. "No, Brandons with an 'A'. Brendon is 'b, r, E, n, d, o, n' this is 'b, r, A, n, d, o, n'." Thanks for the enlightenment Einstein!!

- When told of the plans for St. Patrick's Day "Why? Who's Irish?" We'd already been living there for a month!!

Like we say, she was nice enough to us and they would do everything they could to help us with anything we needed, but thought it was only polite to share some of the gems with you. Neville was more like an immature kid than anything else and once we got used to his humour (usually involving some innuendo or insult) it washed over us and once he saw that we just ignored it he started to ease off a little. It soon became clear that if people didn't bite back then it just wasn't any fun to him!

Each weekend Neville and Michelle would take the kids to Inverell on Friday afternoon until Saturday or Sunday and we would let the dog, Joe, off the chain so that he could run around, and around, and around at a hundred miles an hour and chase the cats. This became our salvation and once we were back from the weekly trip to Warwick for groceries we would spend the rest of the weekend playing with Joe, watching DVD's and playing the PS2 with Chris, drinking and generally enjoying the quiet while we could. Even though Chris left school when he was twelve and was therefore severely undereducated he was far from stupid, and although it took him a while to open up to us due to the lack of interaction with outsiders, he turned out to be a good laugh. We even ended up cooking for him most weekends otherwise he would have been living off beans on toast - by his own admission, the only 'meal' he knows how to cook.

For all their faults, Neville and Michelle were very generous to us and would always invite us over to share the spoils of the BBQ and tell us to come over of an evening if we wanted a bit more warmth than the tent offered. These legendary BBQ's usually meant Neville getting drunk whilst cooking the food and coating the chips with beer, Brendon and Jennifer doing their best to burn themselves, Chris generally abusing everyone about the noise and us trying to look helpful whilst at the same time trying not to get too involved in the madness. One such BBQ was on Paddy's Day as we cooked up a treat for everyone and even Grace came over from up the road to sample the culinary delights. Not quite the usual celebrations, but at least it kept the snakes away for the night!

Over the course of the two months we spent there we witnessed a couple of huge storms, but our tent always managed to hold out despite the gales and torrential rain, although we often had to step out into a swamp to get anywhere as the water took several hours to sift through the rock hard soil. We suffered several power cuts due to the weather (and it always happened at night when it was pitch black) and one particularly violent storm came very close to cooking Neville as he peered out of the doorway and a bolt of lightning struck the water tank a metre or so away!

We also found time to visit Old Macdonald's Farm, in the form of Grace! We had been told that she had a lot of animals at her place but we weren't quite prepared for just how many there were. As soon as we arrived in the car we were surrounded by a couple of dogs barking away and we soon found that there were another five inside the house. Not to mention a couple of horses and a Shetland pony, pigs, goats, chickens and roosters and a few cats lurking around as well (these weren't inside the house just to clarify). As the weather got increasingly cold during the last few weeks, we found great solace in the evenings in the Aga that was in Grace's kitchen as we went over a few times to play with the puppy that was teething and therefore sinking it's teeth into anything it could get hold of, including our fingers, toes and, if could get hold of them, our noses too!!

During all of our time on the farm, Ray and Grace had always told us about the views from the top of the Haystack (a mountain that is part of the Great Dividing Range) that overlooks the whole area and we decided that we couldn't spend almost four months here and not climb it to see for ourselves. So once the harvest was over we found ourselves with Chris looking up from the base of the climb from Grace's farm trying to decide which way we should attack - either up the shorter but steeper route, or the longer more gentle route through the hippy camp just up the road? We opted for the more direct route and soon set off towards the summit. We've done a fair few walks since we've been away ranging from the life sapping climbs of Vietnam and Dunk Island to more leisurely strolls along beaches and through rainforests, but none of them were quite like this one. For a start, all the other walks we have done have been along trails and paths of some sort unlike this ramble through the undergrowth, and secondly we knew roughly where we were going on previous expeditions, whereas all we knew about this trek was that it was far!

After a couple of hours of scrambling over rocks and through intertwining branches we rested at a nice vantage point that allowed us to see out over the farm and far beyond into the distance. We figured it couldn't be too much further to the top so we headed on once again, but it was very hard to know which way we should be aiming as the only direction we could see was up! Every time we stopped and tried to get our bearings we found that we had no choice but to go up until after about three hours we finally reached a plateau. We had been told by Grace that there was some sort of weather beacon at the very top and from here we would be able to see out across the whole valley all the way to Inverell some sixty kilometres away. However, it took us a further ten minutes just to find the damn thing, as the whole area was overgrown with trees whose branches seemed destined to thwart us at every turn, and when we did eventually find it, there was more than a slight element of luck involved.

After climbing to the top of the beacon and discovering that we could see all of ten feet in front of us, people from miles around would have heard our rather colourful language! After the anger had subsided we headed back down in what we assumed was a similar direction to that which we had come from. It was soon clear that we were actually making our way closer and closer to the edge of the mountain where a lovely drop of several hundred metres was ready to welcome us onto the rocks below. It was soon agreed that without compass, map or guide, the best way to make it down safely was to launch the half full bottle of ginger ale that Chris had brought with him as far as we could and if we heard it land then we knew there was ground there. And so we made our way down zigzagging across the mountain throwing the bottle into the trees and then trying to find it again for the next phase. It was a pretty scientific approach and we expect to see it in the next edition of the Lonely Planet under the heading "Genius new tracking method".

As hard as climbing up was, climbing back down had the added problem of not knowing which rocks would actually support us and which rocks would give way and send us flying down the mountain. After a few hours of scrambling down dead ends (literally had we gone a few steps further on a few occasions!) collecting various cuts and scratches along the way, we finally came out into the clearing behind Grace's farm. It was quite a relief to be on relatively flat land again and by the time we were sat down once again in Grace's kitchen we were in desperate need of some liquid refreshment.

When we told Grace of the overgrown mess at the top of the mountain and how we couldn't see more than a couple of metres in any direction, she responded by telling us that government rangers used to maintain the area and set controlled fires a couple of times a year but they hadn't been up there for the last eight years or so!! EIGHT years! What exactly did they expect us to see through eight years of growth?

That evening everyone headed over to Ray and Kathy's place for a BBQ that they were holding to celebrate the end of the harvest. There was the usual array of sausages and burgers on offer along with pizza slices, crisps and dip, salads and other nibbles, plus a fridge full of cold beer for us as well. The food was really nice and it was a lovely gesture from Ray and Kathy to provide for everyone and we spent the evening chatting about everything and nothing and stuffing ourselves silly from all the goodies. It was good to speak to them about stuff other than work and we had a good laugh as Ray talked about us getting stuck in the middle of nowhere out in Western Australia (like this wasn't far enough out of the way) and we mentioned the "lovely old lady that works in the Texas shop" who turned out to be the same age as Kathy, which seemed to particularly delight Ray. It was a great way to end the harvesting as we felt that we had finally got to know them a little better and it also gave us a chance to show them that (despite our elation at finally finishing) we really did appreciate our time on the farm.

We had decided to take the big tent down before we actually left so that we would be ready to leave earlier on our day of departure, so we spent the next day emptying everything out and trying to remember how to fit it all into the car. We put up the small tent for the night and after a few hours the only sign that the big tent had been there was the huge patch of brown grass that was underneath. We even found a squashed red-back spider stuck to the bottom of the tent floor as we rolled it up! Neville and Michelle returned from Inverell later that afternoon and after Michelle had asked the immortal question, "That's not the same tent is it?" we had more than a few drinks with Chris and entertained the kids for the very last time before it was time to get some sleep.

We got ourselves out of bed in time to see the kids off to school this morning. They didn't really appreciate that we would not be back again…ever, which was probably just as well as we had all grown quite close and they were quite upset enough just to learn that we wouldn't be around for their birthdays in a few months time. After a hearty fry up to see us on our way we packed up the last of our things and headed over to the paddock to say goodbye to everyone and get ourselves some tomatoes for our journey. We left the car at the top of the farm knowing it would never make it down the dirt track fully loaded and walked into the paddock with the intention of grabbing a dozen or so tomatoes to last us a couple of weeks. However, when we got there Neville, Michelle and Grace were finishing off the last few drills and they filled two whole boxes for us to take on our travels. And so, after handshakes and hugs abound (as well as Grace nearly tearing down an entire block in order to get over to us) we left the paddock on the back of the Ute with closer to fifty tomatoes between us, as Ray drove back to the packing shed.

We took some photographs of Ray and Kathy and us with the glories of crates of tomatoes and the packing shed forming an appropriate backdrop, before saying our final goodbyes to them and Chris, who had the unfortunate job of unloading the Ute on his own while we chatted to Ray, and setting off for Texas for the last time and onwards through Dalby towards the Bunya Mountains.

Along the way we opened the present that Kathy had given us as we left, to find that they had given us the infamous pink cup that I had become synonymous with and a coffee bean mug and spoon set for Jen, along with a couple of tea bags! It seems that we really did leave an impression with them after all.

For all the hard work that we put in and the difficulties that arose from living next to a lunatic asylum / zoo hybrid we wouldn't change it at all. It was a fantastic experience and we made some really good friends along the way and although we wouldn't necessarily jump at the chance to do it all again, we would definitely recommend that people give it a go if they want to see the other side of life in Australia away from the sun, sea and sand of the coast.