After our amazing escape to Cape Tribulation we headed back down to Cairns for a base to search for a job. We wanted to find a job in North Queensland to stay with the Weather and as we still haven't done the Great Barrier Reef we didn't want to go too far south. We put an ad on Facebook and Gumtree and within the second day we got a phone call from a family managed cattle station in Cooktown, which is 3 hours north of Cairns - Food and accommodation included! They expressed if we were hard working and showed the right attitude the job is ours for as long as we wanted and we could start straight away. So that late afternoon we rushed to the shopping centre in Cairns to purchase everything on the list which included jeans, leather work boots, long sleeve shirts, long socks, a good brim hat and toiletries as there is a small store for groceries yet the closest proper supermarket is a 2.5 hour drive. $350 later we are ready to go. The next morning we drove for 1.5 hours and we lost all signal to our phones and found ourselves on an endless straight road and rarely passed any people or cars, the only thing we could see was cattle and country. Another 2 hours and we were at Kings Plains Station. We drove through the front gate and a further 15kms to the home stead. We met Linda and she showed us around, took us to our own private double air conditioned donga where we settled in and then the rest of the family came back from work, we sat down and had tea together. Darryl, Linda their son Bevin and his partner Karen and their two kids Tahnee aged 3 and Noah aged 6.

Fast forward 37 days and we still absolutely love it! We are both doing things we would have never imagined doing and learning things we thought we'd never learn. Breakfast can be as early as 4:30am and we can finish as late as 7:00pm but generally we have breakfast at 6 and finish at 5:30, unless we have cattle going to sale and then we start earlier. We usually get Sundays off but if there are cattle in the yards we'll continue working. We've had 4 days off so far and haven't felt like doing anything yet except for eating and sleeping. Cooktown is a 50 minute drive and is the closest town with pretty much everything you need and the closest beach is an hour away in a completely different direction.

So far we have learnt how to repair broken fences, how to put up a barbed wire fence, how to roll up a barbed wire fence, how to angle grind, how to weld (still practising!), how to concrete, how to drive 4WDs, how to hitch and un-hitch trailers, how to reverse with a trailer (still need practise), how to trap cattle, how to load and un-load cattle, how to muster on quad bikes and on foot, how to draft cattle, how to process cattle, how to drive through creeks, how to spray poison out of a 20L backpack, how to whipper snip, how to use a drip torch, how to do controlled burning and that's all that I can think of off the top of my head so far!

We have been a part of mustering cattle from paddock to paddock, across the highway into yards with a chopper, quad bikes and a buggy. We have watched Darryl, Bevin, Karen and the kids kill a cow and skin her and dissect its body for meat that we ate on the BBQ that night and yes the kids helped too! Meg stood back and felt sick whilst you can see the cows nerves and legs moving as if she was running let alone the fact when they cut the stomach open a baby calf came out which would have been delivered a month later if it wasn't shot. What a life changing experience it has all been, so far.