Sometimes I feel like the bridesmaid but never the bride. I have ended up working in the town of Derby which appears to be the fake pearl next to its creamy Paspaley Pearl cousin town Broome. Broome has the dazzling Cable Beach, Derby has miles of mud flats. Broome has the romantic pearling history, Derby has the Boab Prison Tree and the rather more prosaic cattle shipping history. It lacks a town centre and any sort of aesthetic beauty. However, and I can't really compare Broome here because i haven't worked there, but Derby does have the most friendly, relaxed local hospital that I have ever had the pleasure to work for. It may be a bit early to call this after only 2 days, but my gut tells me it was a good move to take up this 6 week locum. I guess only time will tell if I'm right, or if too much chocolate has corrupted the predictive abilities of my large intestine. Plus, the job comes with a house! It's like a holiday from the caravan! The pays not bad either- 88,000 per annum for a senior job. Now that's more like it. Perhaps fortunately, this acting senior role has already been recruited to, else we might have ended up living in Derby for a couple of years. Today I flew on a RFDS plane 250 kms to Fitzroy to run a clinic. We left at 7am and landed under a pink setting sun at 6pm. It's a different world, healthcare up here.

The weekend excursions are pretty good too with the gorges and waterfalls of the Gibb River Road just down the way and beautiful Broome over the other way, although last week in Broome, the sea was covered in red jelly fish and the morning dew fell like rain. Not quite as I remembered, but memories can be fickle things I guess.

Tom and the kids are loving the house though. They have smashed the schoolwork and built a cubby house in the back yard. The cul-de-sac has several families and the kids are all around the boy's age which has been really nice for them. Our next door neighbour, Shannon, comes from a community called Lombadina up on the Dampier Peninsula. He has lent us his crab nets and told us about the giant trumpet cone shells that you can get on the reef at low tide.

Over the long weekend, we were lucky enough to get taken on a trip up to the Buccaneer Archipelago on a boat belonging to Steve Sparkes, a storeman at the Hospital. Fo the price of a couple of tanks of petrol, we stayed at a fishermans camp on an uninhabited cove 50 nautical miles north of Derby. Freshwater springs abounded and provided magical swimming holes. We fished for Mangrove Jack and Fingermarks. Oscar and Ned caught a reasonable Bream and a few small colourful fish called Spanish Flags. we swam in a sheltered cove and then saw a 4 metre croc cruise past our camp! Ned rated the weekend as the best ever...Thanks Sparkesy, couldn't have gone there without you.