Another visit to Lightning Ridge

The 6 weeks since my last post have been so busy  and time and energy consuming that I just haven't had time to  sit down and compile a new post.
 Last month Brian and his brother travelled back to Lightning Ridge for 10 days to work with another brother in the opals fields and I kept busy here looking after the farm,animals and catching up on some preserving.
Two weeks ago we  all ventured  up To Lightning Ridge again to help out where possible.
As we drove  into the mine area I was totally  in awe of the Roly Poly grass balls, dried and piled up everywhere  pushed by the wind.

The boys got busy down in the big sandpit playing with those big tonka toys, Brian drives the red and white tipper,

and the brother in law from next door drove the "Big Yellow Ute"

The boys all took turns in loading the stock pile of earth into the hopper with the front end loader.

My Sister in law  Yvette and myself  were on "keeping the hopper flowing to the conveyor belt" duty,

and after a day of doing this, my hands  fell to pieces !(even though I was wearing gloves.)

We resigned from that job (some other men arrived and we happily handed it over to them)
The next job we got was running the water truck down to the artesian bore and filling up the 3 X 1000 litre water pods and  driving them back to  the campsite.

 We were so funny, so nervous and we only drove the little old truck 20 klms /hr and in second gear(nervous Nellies)
While we were at the washery   I decided to do some shadow photos after doing one shot by chance.
Yvette and I first,

then Brian and I,

and finally 4 of us workers.

We girls were on Kitchen duty, putting out many meals and snacks over the 10 days but unfortunately while looking for a knife in the  utensils drawer I found it sooner than expected and sliced my finger badly.

Thank goodness my daughter had made us up a wonderful emergency medical kit to keep in our caravan  and we were able to doctor my finger up beautifully, but it certainly curtailed  my work for a few days. It is all mended now.
I went a little crazy with the camera  up there and I will now bore you to death with a mass of images that I fell in love with at the washery run off area.

As the clay that washes down dries it leaves the most amazing patterns.

Back at camp, the fluffy dust caught my eye, with tyre tracks and boot prints jumping out at me.

 Our brother and sister in law have installed a spa bath at the  washery, there are already rough tin showers erected  there and plumbed into the hot artesian water and now  people can  relax in the bath to soak  away their  aches and pains after a day of back breaking opal mining.

 One day  Yvette and I went down to the spa, only to find that the area we stopped the vehicle in was  a wet spot and when we went to leave, we sunk and the ute bogged. The biggest embarrassment was to have to  wait until Brian passed by in the tip truck and flag him down to get us out of the bog.

 Just  before dark each evening our friends the goats came to visit us each night across the other side of the mine . All up there was about 8 of them, a sweet little family group.

A local man who is friends of my brother in law , had spotted an emu nest  during his  work day on a nearby property and offered to take us to see it. I had seen an Emu egg before, but had never seen an actual nest site.

The male Emu, who sits on the eggs to incubate them ran off as we approached , but Charlie assured us that he would return once we  went away.
At the end of the week, we "tailed out", which is the term for  when all the earth that has been washing in the giant agitator(like a big cement mixer) and all the rocks, stones and beautiful little pieces of timber come  rolling down the shute onto the table where they are sorted through hoping to find those  elusive stunning opals.

This what was sorted, not a great haul, but they told us there were a couple of nice stones  in the bucket.

The boys dug out quite a bit of earth , the pit changes  every day, this was a pic I took on the last day.

One day Yvette and I roped one of those big prickly Roly Poly's, popped it in the back of the ute and took it back to camp, That night we lit it up and rolled it down the road  into the mine.

What I have posted here is just a snippet of what we did, we love "The Ridge" and will probably  be back there many more times to visit and have a working holiday.
Life here has returned to it's normal busy routine and will probably be even busier over the next few months. I will try  to update a little more often , but time will tell.
Take care until we meet again.
Cheers
Jane and Brian.

Out and About and Back Home Again.

Once again we have had a few busy weeks, and I am only now getting the time to catch up on the blog.
We were invited  to our great nieces wedding, which was to be held in the garden  at  the home of   friend  of theirs . as it was located several kilometres out of town and  drinks and nibbles were going to be served out there while the bride and groom had their photographs taken, they hired a courtesy bus to take  the guests to and from the wedding ceremony to the reception.. We were all surprised to see it was the double decker red party bus.

My elderly mother insisted on traveling on the bus with us and although it was a major struggle getting her and her  assistance walker  on board  the bus and off again, it was so worth the effort as  she had the most  wonderful time.

The garden the wedding  was held in was beautiful, especially considering that  this last year has been in severe  drought. I was told that the bride and groom had spent months carting water to the property  to keep everything alive .
The  ceremony area was set up beautifully,

The grooms mother is a florist and the displays of native flowers in the  arrangements for decoration and the bridal party  bouquets  were stunning The reception was held at a club back in town and  the auditorium  was decorated exquisitely ,

Those gorgeous flowers  were just overwhelming, I have never seen such  gorgeous native  arrangements  as they had there,

The  wedding cake  was simple and  stunning, it was used as dessert.
It  was a gorgeous wedding, and  we were honoured to be invited,  our cute  little  red headed niece   has grown up to be a beautiful   young woman and made a truly gorgeous bride.
We returned home for a few days  and caught up on a few things, Brian added a new power inverter to our caravan so that  I  can successfully  run n my CPAP machine throughout  the night when we are not on powered sites and are dependent on our battery supply.

It's  really great as it gives me two extra power points  plus two extra  USB charge points.
We headed off again!,

This time destination Trundle ABBA Festival.
We were the first of our group to arrive and selected a good campsite, which for the first  few hours we felt quite alone,

The rest of crew arrived  and we circled the vans like covered wagons, the reason being to try to block some of the persistent  strong winds that felt like they were reaching gale force.

The racecourse camping filled up quickly,

It was cold ,so we lit  a fire in our new fire bin, an ex beer keg that has been modified for the purpose, It was lovely and warm, and we were glad that we had taken a supply of wood with us.

The next morning we got ourselves ready to head down the street for the day's festivities.

Brian's sister and her partner  got in the spirit,

As did our great nieces,

We were ready to head off !!!
The was a display of over 100  vintage cars down in the main street,

Brian and  the other men loved looking at all the beautiful old cars.

There were many  people dressed  for the  festival, true Abba devotees,

We moved over to the oval later in the afternoon ready for the highlight of Bjorn Again performing, and  the next photos are from there.

We had a wonderful night at the concert. Bjorn Again are just amazing performers, you can close your eyes and you would swear you are listening to ABBA.
We had a wonderful weekend, Trundle volunteers  do  a truly amazing job in organizing  this brilliant festival, This year they made some changes to the program which we and many people we spoke to  agreed wasn't really  for the best and I hope that they revise these changes next year, Some changes they made were definately for the better, and I realize that  things can't always stay the same.
When we left Trundle we made a detour to our eldest daughter's home to celebrate the 5th birthday of our sweet granddaughter.

We brought the girls and their kelpie dog Desmo  back to the farm for a few days to give  their parents some time to do a few things they needed to catch up on.
We cooked cupcakes and decorated them.

They helped Poppy do lots of jobs with the sheep and chickens and Desmo the Kelpie  has  settled into farm  life well too helping at every opportunity.

I met back up with my daughter to return the girls, and we also caught up with my Mum for Mothers Day  and  so that she could meet her new Great grandson for the first time.
We got a couple of photos while we were there to record the four generations together.

Brian  headed back up to Lightning Ridge to spend some time with his brothers  and while he was away I  got into some canning.
I  tried something new that I had been wanting to  do, canning corned beef chunks.

To each jar I added brown sugar, peppercorns, malt vinegar and cloves, placed the rings, lids and clips on the jars,

Placed into the pressure canner and processed for 90 minutes at the correct pressure for our altitude.

I haven't tried this  yet, I am hoping that this will a very useful tasty addition to our pantry . It will great to have canned corn meat on hand for salads and hot meals.
It's been a fairly hectic few weeks, and  I think the next few will be equally as busy.
Today I attended the "Biggest Morning Tea"  in town and it was well attended by  locals and some visiting travellers, The organizers raised a very healthy $1000 or more, well done to the volunteers who ran the morning. The Cancer Council will be glad of that generous donation .
So until we meet again down the road,
Take care of you and yours,
Cheers
Jane and Brian.