Off to the back of Beyond

So to get to young we had to get a train to Cootamundra and from there we had to get the bus to Young. The train left on time at 7:45 and we got to Cootamundra about 12:50. Unfortunately we had an almost 2 hour wait until the bus would depart so we walked to get some lunch. I had half a roasted chicken and half a loaf of bread, a good hearty meal even by my standards.
We got the bus to young which only took about 50 minutes. We got there unloaded our bags and walked into town to find a place to say. The cherry picking season was about to start a day later so there was no where to stay. Luckily Smithy saw a mate from Sydney and he informed us we could stay in a cattle shed on a race horse track for $3 each a night. We walked up there in the baking heat which took ages.
We got there and saw the French guys who had given us the directions and another group that could be only described as drifters. Basically your typical type of person that got drunk all day and fruit picked when they could be bothered or needed money for more booze. We only stayed there a night because Smithy nor I felt comfortable with leaving our bags with all our worldly belongings in. That was the first night we slept in our single skin tent and believe me, it was hell!
The month of the fruit.
Last night was terrible, no sleeping bags, only every item of clothing i had in my bag on to keep me warm. We got up early to walk down to the ready workforce building to pickup details of our placement. We arrived about 10 minutes after the building opened and had an offer for work by about 9:15. We were given the address so we needed to get supplies. First stop was the camping shop then the supermarket and lastly the Op shop (charity shop to you and I). I spending broken down to roughly the below.
Camping stove and pots and pans: $22.50
Food for three days for three people: $20
Sheets and pillows from the op-shop: $10
Only buying two sleeping bags for three people and making the same mistake as Yosemite: PRICELESS!
We headed back to Workforce and waited for another Tom from Chile who would be on the same placement with us to arrive and share a taxi. When he did arrive we got the taxi, which was creaking with the sheer amount of baggage and food and got it up to Bill Smithers’ farm. It was about a $40 taxi ride. We unloaded the taxi accidently stealing the taxi drivers uniform jacket, setup the tent and got taken up the fields to get on with the work.
Fruit picking isn’t easy, it hurts your fingers. We were warned by the drifters in the cattle shed to watch out for red back spiders as well as another five or so various spiders and snakes that could potentially kill us. I was starting to this wasn’t such a good idea. Bill taught us how to pick to pick the cherries and we were away. We work from about 1pm until roughly 6. We headed back down to the tent thoroughly pooped. Finger was killing but we hadn’t even started yet. We slept like babies that night. When we awoke the next day we all had agreed that last night’s sleep was much better. Tom, Smithy and I got up about 6:30, had breakfast and headed up to the field to start picking again. Today was hot, when i say hot i mean a good 35 degrees of head. We used the spare t-shirt to FASHION turbans. Our diet for the picking in this farm was to be cereal for breakfast , crisp sandwiches for lunch witch Simthy had kindly introduced us to (much like Woody and the foil packs). For tea we had pasta pasta and pasta. Things were good. That day we picked 27, we were lucky because we were allowed to trash the tree which normally is a big no go but because he planned on knocking them down we were allowed to rip the buds and even snap the branches.
The day after we got up well early but when we got to the fields, we quite simply couldn’t be bothered. We finished picking the row and the farmer had told us to move up to the corner of the field where there was a retched stench. We all thought it would be the toilet block from the next farm. When Bill came up later to pick up the lugs (which i will explain later) he informed us that the horrific stench was an inquisitive horse that had got bitten by a snake was rotting about 50 meters away, Nice! We picked the two rows by the rotting horse; we were then instructed to head up to the back of the field about 1last day5o meters away from the farm house and packing room. We finished the day with 21, which wasn’t bad because we started the morning by only completing 8 lugs. We headed back to the farm about seven, cooked tea, had a shower and went straight to bed. Tomorrow was to be out last day on Bills farm so we had a beer to celebrate.