Nathan and Deb's Cattle Farm - The Arrival

15 May 2009

Today we had out biggest drive ahead of us - we were heading to Nathan and Debbie Carr's property, 40km SW of Biloela. We had directions from Deb to their property, but were forewarned that other visitors had gotten lost for hours trying to find the house - so we were a bit worried because we didn't want to have to try and turn the van around too many times.

We are usually pretty good with directions, so we were feeling pretty confident that we were on the right track and would have no worries at all. We found the turn off from the highway easily enough and turned onto the dirt road - it was then that we saw the sign which said 14km of dirt road! "This isn't so bad" Chris said "Some highways are worse than this". However that didn't last too long - the road started getting narrower - it started getting rockier, and we started getting more and more worried.

The "pretty good" dirt road changed quite quickly into a rocky, gravelly track which had short but steep rises - which certainly put the truck and van to the test. Chris had to use low gear for a lot of this part of the road, which made a slow and rough ride - who knows what state the inside of the van was going to be when we arrived. In amongst all this bumping and banging, we saw our first snake of the trip - thank god we were in the car! We came up a short rise and it was stretched out across the road sunning itself - it reached from one side to the other and with the van on the back Chris had no way of stopping and ran over it. He wasn't sure if we killed it or not - and I wasn't about to let him go and see - so we kept driving on into the unknown.

At this point we were so convinced that we must have been going the wrong way we started discussing options for turning around - but they were very limited. In fact there was no option but to keep going forward. The trees and branches were touching the van on both sides and it was just a dirt track through the bush - so we kept pushing on thinking we would just have to keep going until we either found their place or somewhere to turn around.

Surprisingly we were actually on the right road and found their street (if you could call it a street) and turned up toward their place. Nathan was just returning from Bileola, via a different route, when and caught a glimpse of us as he turned into his driveway - not that you could miss us - he said we looked like a building driving down the road!

Arriving was a good feeling - now I could stop worrying that we are lost and relax! The kids jumped out, and after 5 weeks of not having any other kids to play with, they were very excited to meet Cooper and Cassidy. Most people know that our kids are not very shy, but by the time Chris and I had reversed the van in and set it up, Deb knew all about our kids. They told her their birthdays, what they do and don't like, where we had been and what we were doing. Chris and I were also looking forward to the next couple of days here with Nathan and Deb -sitting down, having a chat and catching up on the last couple of years.