YEEHAH!! Today Joel & I were impersonating John Wayne & Clint Eastwood (not Heath Ledger & Jake Gyllenhall) at the Kroombit Cattle Station. We were picked up around 8:30am by our driver, 'Thunder' & we met our new group. Upon turning on to the dirt road leading to Kroombit's entrance, we put some Johnny Cash on the bus speakers to get into the spirit of things. Arriving just around midday, we tucked into a hearty steak BBQ lunch & were given a run down of the activities awaiting us. Our first activity was a choice between horse riding or quad biking. What with Amylou's fear of any animal, the girls opted for the quad bikes, whereas Joel & I went off to play cowboys.

After equipping ourselves with a cowboy hat & bandanas around our necks, we just needed a horse to complete our outfits. Joel was given the choice of 'Jay' or 'Dancer' as his horse. So Joel, being the typical girl that he is, chose Dancer, justifying his choice by saying that it sounded like Santa's reindeer 'Prancer'. Perhaps he should have chosen Jay, because that sounds more like 'GAY'! I was paired up with a horse called 'Snip'. I'm guessing he had recently had the snip because it moved slower than an anorexic at a pie eating contest!! Once everyone had a horse we headed out to the fields in search of the goats that we were about to muster up. En-route to the goats, my horse decided to have a toilet break. I had to stand up in the stirrups in order to take the pressure off of his bladder, which apparently was the size of an olympic swimming pool judging by the amount of pi$$ that came out. Once we had tracked the goats down, we formed an arc behind them & pushed them towards the gate at the bottom of the field. We had to shout & make lots of noise to scare the goats into moving. This involved us shouting 'Hey Ub Ub'. Don't ask me what it means, but it seemed to work! All the shouting left me feeling like a pony.......a little hoarse! Boom boom! Whilst we were herding the goats we came across a huge python, that must have been just short of 5ft long. Naturally we avoided it so that the horses didn't freak out. Once we had managed to get all of the goats into the pen, we took the horses back to the stables via a scenic route that involved a creek. We were told to make sure our horses kept moving, because if they stopped in the water it was more than likely that they would want to roll over & have an impromptu swim. Lo & behold, Snip decided to stop mid-stream....but thankfully carried on after a few swift kicks to his midriff. He must have been tired from all the strenuous, high speed galloping that he had not been doing all afternoon. With the stables in sight, Snip demonstrated to me that he did indeed have a second gear & sped towards home. We all dismounted & headed towards our next activity walking as though we had tried to stick a square peg into a round hole!!

We met up with the girls & went off for a bit of clay pigeon shooting. We all faired pretty well, getting 3 out of the 5 targets, with Joel hitting 4 out of 5, showing once again that he knows how to handle another man's weapon!! Next on the agenda was Lasso throwing. The idea was to get good at this before the goat rodeo, as that was when our lasso skills would be called into action. Out of about 25 attempts, I managed to lasso my target once! So splitting into teams of 3, we headed for the goat rodeo. Once again, thanks to Amylou's inert fear of animals, Joel & I teamed with Sally & headed to the arena. The object was to get in the goat pen, lasso a goat, pretend to brand it (it's apparently ok to drag a goat around by it's horns, but not to stick a red hot iron on it's backside) & then drag it out of the pen in the quickest time possible. Due to my less than amazing skills at lassoing earlier, I was assigned that job! Despite having roughly 30 goats to aim for, I caught sod all for the first 30 seconds. So we gave up with the rope & just grabbed the nearest goat with our hands, branded it & then dragged it out of the pen. Job done!! Once all the teams were done we all gathered in a circle for cattle prod spin the bottle. Whoever it landed on got the brunt of the cattle prod's power, however because we were all holding hands, we all felt the shock.

Heading back to camp for dinner, we stopped to try some bush nibbles that had been cooked up, which turned out to be a very tasty goat. It was then time for the evenings entertainment of whip cracking & the bucking bronco. Joel & I quickly became as good as Indiana Jones at producing the whip's sonic boom crack. If only the same could be said for the bucking bronco!! Out of the two of us, I went first & managed to stay on for a respectable 14 bucks before tumbling off to the floor. So it came to Joel's turn & seeing as a few of the girls on the bus had predicted him to win, the pressure was on! After just 2 bucks & a couple of extremely girly screams, joel was tasting mat. See the video section of this blog for reference or if you just need a bloody good giggle!! My second attempt faired a bit better as I lasted 18 bucks this time, so Joel would surely improve this time right??? WRONG!! It took just one buck this time for him to fall, however I will give him his due as his scream was a bit more manly this time!!

That bought an end to the day's festivities, but Joel & I stayed up to play some drinking games with the Northbound Oz passengers. Not entirely sure how but it ended up with me telling a man 3 times my size that I wanted to take a sh!t on his chest, dry humping a guy's leg whilst he slept & doing a naked somersault over a fence. Thankfully Joel eclipsed this by licking a man's testicle!! We finally stumbled to bed around 3:30am as we had a bus to catch at 5:30am!!