Yeeee Haaaaa! i am officially a cowboy!...of sorts...and welcome from Kroombit cattle ranch!

we arrived at Kroombit around lunch time after a fairly early start and i have to warn you, i wasnt in a good mood. and between a very bad phone call on the bus and them serving steak for lunch (those who know me well know my disgust of large chunks of meat such as steak - no pun intended by the way :P) i was pretty sure my day wasnt going to get much better. anyway, i persevered and bought the cowboy hat and scarf ready for the evenings festivities, fully prepared to emerse myself in the famous 'giggle juice' they offered here (skanky champagne for $10 a bottle!) when the oppertunity to go horse riding came about. now I had only been on a horse once since i had an accident some years back on holiday and have been kinda deathly scared of horses since, but i figured hey my day cant get any worse right?! plus sophie and the girls really wanted to so i thought i may as well :P

as it turned out they decided to put me on the BIGGEST horse i have EVER seen! i mean dont get me wrong Chrissy (the horse - not as good a name as Carlos but oh well) was magnificent and utterly beautiful, but she was also massive. and could have crushed me without noticing. however it also turned out she was pretty damn lazy and thus very slow - so slow in fact that i was constantly trying to get her to go faster - somehow she didnt understand that i was in charge...like a giant taking orders from a hobbit - its just not going to happen because however hard i try and kick her, my legs will barely reach her in the first place! now it wasnt just any normal horse trek, we actually had a job to do - me, soph, maddy and anna as well as a couple of guides, one of which was called josh, had some goat mustering to do! basically we had to ride around some massive fields and hills and stuff and shout at the goats until they stopped eating or s***ting and followed us - eventually we had to get them into a pen but that took a LOT of steering believe me! goats really arnt very smart you know, and regardless of the guides instruction on what to shout, i found it a lot more effective to swear blindly at them or threaten them with a trampling from chrissy! for example, a typical um phrase of encouragement would be "move your bloody arse you pregnant (most of them were) mutha fukkaaaaaa! or something similar along those lines :P and no i didnt feel bad about obviously abusing pregnant goats...because they're goats. and i save my emotions for creatures that have more to do in life than eat and s***. but i do admit, it was fun! and along with getting all of my anger out i also kinda felt a sense of pride when we finally got them in the pen - so a very cool experience!

by the time we got back, along with now being known as josh's goat b****es, it was time for the afternoons activites to begin: first off - lassoo lessons :P it was proper cowboy stuff we were doing here! i mean obviously we wernt allowed to practise lassooing real animals but those wooden posts didnt know what hit them! i actually got the hang of it pretty quickly and aside from lassooing Will a couple of times (blatently on purpose :P) i was quite successful :P next up was the famous goat rhodeo - using our dear little goat friends we just spent hours herding into the damn pen! basically we had to get into groups of 3 and stand in the middle of the pen in a circle. only one person was allowed to leave the circle at each time and the game was one person had to run in and catch the goat (a specific one picked out for you), one person had to flip it over (penalty's given for hurting the goat) and the other had to pretend to brand it (another penalty for touching the hot end of the fake brand :P). before we could do this we had to think of a name, and although we would have loved to have been 'josh's goat b****es', we got split up group wise so me, sophie and umm this other girl settled on 'new kids on the ranch' (it had to have something to do with goats or kids etc) and anna, maddy and will thought of 'goat-back mounting' - get it, instead of brokeback mountain - obviously inspired by Will's beautiful gay cowboy look :P. so the games began and obviously it was my job to catch the damn goat - i wouldnt have it any other way! and suprisingly enough we came second! which given the fact that we were the only group without a guy in it to catch the goat, i think it pretty damn good! i mean it did involve me literally throwing myself on a herd of goats - some of which were pregnant, and i did have to rugby tackle it and practically drag it out by the horns but it doesnt matter - we came second!

you're probably thinking by now that there isnt much more fun you can have on a cattle ranch? well you would be wrong. because next they brought out the cattle prod. the game was you all stood in a circle holding hands and they touched one person with it and the current travelled round the whole group. then people would drop out and the group would be smaller so you would feel it more etc. well thats all well and good but when ben - one of the workers on the ranch - got the guy to do it on his bare bum (thats 10,000 volts by the way) well, he stepped it up a gear! and since NONE of the other guys in the whole big group had the guts to get it done to themselves, well i didnt really have a choice - i HAD to step up! yes i realise 10,000 volts running through anyone's heart let alone mine is never good and yes i heard sophie and maddy's gasps of fear and anna's look of terror (:P) but this was a matter of pride! plus i wanted to show the boys up, because if they didnt have the balls to do it i sure would! so i held out my bare arm and 3 seconds later 10,000 volts of cattle prodding goodness were running through me! ok so i may have squealed a little and i jumped about a bit afterwards but apart from that - it only tickled a little :P plus, now i have respect. and thats all that counts :P

and so the afternoons entertainment was over and off to get ready for dinner did we go - this involved putting a cowboy hat on and a neck scarf basically. and a steak later (yes they really like steak here) it was round three - whip cracking. we were shown by Al (the guy who ran the place) how to do it so that you got a sonic boom (really cool loud crack made by like physics and stuff) and in groups went up to have a go. apparently the smallest person often makes the biggest noise, and after a few go's i was cracking that b**** up baby! only thing was the girls said i looked kinda evil when i was really getting into it and i must admit i was getting a LOT of anger out with that whip - great stress toy by the way, must remember to get dad one! so talents from this evening so far include bullying pregnant goats, tieing people up from a distance, kidnapping said goats, withstanding large electric shocks and creating sonic booms with a whip...i wonder how i could relate all that to PR on my CV?

next installment for the night - the bucking bronco. 'would all people with back or neck issues please NOT ride the bucking bronco'...me, a back problem?? noooooo, they cant mean me?! ill have a go anyway just incase :P 7 bucks first time baby!!! apparently i have thighs of steal..thanks mum! i was winning as well until will got slightly too competative and had another go and beat me, still i got 7 bucks which, when you watch sophie doing forward flips over it on her second, and maddy just falling under it on her first, is still pretty impressive!

now so far this all sounds very good and fun and everything, well what i neglected to mention was that earlier on in the evening i dropped my camera in the loo. dont ask why i had it out in the loo, it was just out ok. and yes it was even in its case and still somehow that annoying little b***** of a camera still managed to break. spectaculaly. so i was cameraless for the whole rest of the night hence the lack of pictures. and after countless bottles of giggle juice and some drinking games i also managed to fall over a log. a really really big sharp evil log. basically i was trying to find phone service and it was pitch black and i couldnt see the damn thing so i decided to do a forward flip over it just to check it was really there. stop laughing. after consulting the nearest backpacker medical student, who perscribed cake and pie for my injury (i liked her a lot) i went to bed thinking b***** i have ruined a pair of leggings, however by the morning i was thinking more along the lines of b***** where did all this blood come from?! turned out i had cut my leg quite badly and it was still kinda bleeding...this combined with a hangover and the very quick realization that i had lost $60 when i fell over that log (fell out of the pocket scenario) did not make for a happy jenni at all.

so three things happened this morning. the first was that i went to have a serious word with that log and maybe kick it a bit when i found the $60 still stuck underneith it, so i forgave it...a bit. but my leg still hurt so no not really. the second was that whilst physically and emotionally dying from self inflicted giggleness on the bus journey we found out from our driver 'Brett' that we had by far beaten the Oz experience record for giggle juice drinking! yay for us!! apparently the previous record was around 20 or so bottles between a group of about 22 - well between the 24 of us on the bus we managed to drink 32 bottles!! and after working it out, we figured out that between me, sophie, maddy, anna and Will, we had drunk 12 of those 32 bottles!! so really the rest of the bus are lightweights and we did all the hard work! :P

anyway thats about it for now, oh yeah the third thing, right, well the third thing was that i decided kroombit would from now on be 'the place'. you know everyone has that place where they go when they need a break, well kroombit would be mine, and im pretty sure it would be sophies too becuase both of us didnt really want to leave, we would have been quite happy working there for a month or so just riding and looking after all the bus groups. maybe in a while i will get the chance to go back becuase really, it is just the best of places, and whenever i need a break from life or the world or anything, i am definitly going to make my way back there :)

xxx