Week 17 around Litchfield Café

Had a couple of fun afternoons at the café. I’ve gone up around 3pm each afternoon (after the lunch rush) and the kids and I have hung around and chatted to people. We had a lovely couple from Melbourne staying in the tents for a couple of nights and they were great to talk to (I think Mum and Dad even had dinner with them one night!) and then a young family from Lismore (who cloth nappy and AP no less! Wow!) so Jordy and Darcy played with their son and I had a lovely natter and a few other really friendly groups through that were up for a chat.

There were a few evenings where were still up at the café talking until far too late and there was a big rush to feed the kids and shower before the sun set (it gets cold out there in our outdoor shower once the sun is gone!).

Just a km down the road from Litchfield Café there is a Winter Solstice celebration party weekend festival sort of thing on at the moment. Heaps of DJs from Darwin and Adelaide and around the place are there. It officially started on Saturday but on Friday night they must have had something going on cos we could hear the doof doof music from the café (and from our caravan!) We are so used to the peace and quiet of an evening that I have to say I kind of resented the noise even though it was no louder than you’d hear in town if the people down the street had a party (and much much quieter than the teenager next door at Port ever was!)
We were all given free tickets so Mum and I took the boys for a look on Saturday afternoon. A heap of people camping out there but not entirely what I expected. Seemed like a bunch of backpackers trying too hard to be hippies and just smoking and drinking and missing the whole point of the beauty of the area. But they seemed to be having a fun time so it was all good. We just had a bit of a look around and then sat and listened to the music and watched the boys dance and chase around the place for an hour and then came home. Apparently some of the kids from the local Woolaning community danced at sundown and that would have been nice to see but we did not head back for it. The music did not stop all night! But they had a groovy didgeridoo or synthesized didgeridoo track playing from sunrise for about an hour and that was nice to wake up to. It reminded me of the guy and his band that play the Mindil Markets with a great combo of hip hop sort of music and the didgeridoo and clapping sticks etc. It may even have been him??

Getting cooler here of a night! Down to 6’C outside and 13’C in the van. We have all the blankets out! But the days are just glorious. We've been for a few nice early morning walks just close by camp for no reason other than to wander and it's been lovely. The kids love LOVE the wallabies and kangaroos around the place. Darcy in particular!

week 14

i think it is week 14?? i'll check later.

Jordy and Darcy had a great afternoon at the cafe the other day. We had about 30 Chinese people in for a late lunch. I think it was a big extended family with kids, teenagers, young couples, older couples.... a whole big bunch of people. And they went crazy with the boys :)

Tim and Lisa were flat out in the kitchen (everyone else had the day off and was in Darwin) so i was trying to clear tables for them and the boys were just walking around following me and playing with some lego and all of a sudden Darcy is being carried around and goo'ed over and all the kids have swarmed Jordy and are running and playing. In the end the boys were passed around, photographed, hugged by everyone, fed ice-creams!! and just generally made a fuss of. Jordy actually cried when they left (god love him). It was so funny to watch. But it was handy cos i got heaps of work done.

The snakes are still out and about. Tim and Jordy encountered one in the toilet the other day. Neither had shoes on cos they were just going over there first thing in the morning. I think it gave him a bit of a fright to be confronted with a hissing rearing snake while he had his hands full keeping Jordy up off the ground. He couldn't even chase it anywhere without kicking-boots and had nothing to kill it with. So now even early morning pee stops need shoes.

The boys both love helping me do the gardening. Darcy is now totally obsessed with sprinklers and heads for them at every opportunity and trys to drag them around. He ends up soaking wet every time. Luckily we dry off super fast in the heat.

Here is Julian (and Dad) burning off. This is the local fire tanker.


Here is Darcy chewing on his 1st Birthday card from Nanny and Poppy that came in our mail bundle.


This is an older one that i forgot to include in a blog post - doing some drawings

I drove into Batchelor this morning to get the mail and was planning to catch up with things online but it was not as easy as I had hoped!
When I checked the mail box I thought, YAY! Just a small envelope of letters from Ray and Joy, they must really be sorting through the crap… then I saw the parcel notification card and went inside and was handed a massive bag of mail… urgh! Lucky the kids fell asleep on the way in and I could sit in the truck for an hour and sort though the massive bundle into smaller piles of urgent, sort-out-at-home, and no-clue-what-this-is-about!

Then we went to the library where I hoped I could pay some bills online and catch up on emails. No luck. The kids were great but there is only so much you can get done with two boys running and laughing around a previously quiet library and only so long you can ignore an ever growing pile of books on the floor in front of you before you really have to give up on getting anything done and start paying attention to your kids!

So while I took photos in to upload I did not get a chance and I had no hope of updating the blog. But there is a lot of other stuff that Tim and I need to sort out online and getting into town is not proving easy so we are going to ask the boss here if we can use his office and his computer to sort some stuff out tonight… if you are ready this then he said yes. LOL.

What’s been happening this last week….

Had a few funny wildlife encounters.

There are a lot of wallabies around the whole area and our camp is no exception. Before we parked our vans here the clearing up and track down to the creek must have been a popular spot because they hang around right outside the van (which the kids love). Actually, there is a mummy wallaby with a big joey in her pouch that hangs around out the back all the time and I have been trying to get a good photo of her but with not much luck. Darcy keeps trying to make friends and runs at her shouting “dog” and as you would expect mummy-wallaby never seems to hang around for a pat.

But most nights we hear them jumping through the walkway between the two vans and often hear the twang as they trip over our awning ropes (sorry, fellas) so we have gotten used to that noise. A couple of nights ago I was awake with Darcy and heard some movement in behind the vans. I listened for a while and it was not a wallaby. It sounded more like a person walking but you’d have to be crazy to be walking along there at night in the dark with no torch and even if you were crazy there is no reason to be walking there (keep in mind we are in the middle of not much and our camp is at the back of the middle of not much!) so you’d have to be crazy and lost…. But I watched for a bit trying to work out what the noise was. I saw something disappear up behind the donga (and I am still not convinced that it wasn’t a person!) but ten minutes later there was a knocking/hammering/banging type sound from the other end of our camp closer to the café. So I woke Tim up just in case there were people dicking around up at the café. He assured me that Julian often gets up at odd times when he can’t sleep and he might be up there working?!? WTF??!? I was not convinced and I stood looking out the window for a bit wondering if I should go and have a look but Darcy was unsettled and I did not want him to wake while I was gone (cos he’d fall out of bed). Then out the window in the light from our shower block I could see dirt flying in the air. ?? So I woke Tim again. He was convinced that it was Julian cos if it were a thief what would they be doing digging around our vans. He had a point but what the hell would Julian be doing digging a hole in the middle of the dark. Anyway, I went back to bed and figured I’d have a look in the morning.

Next morning I did notice a big dug-up patch of sandy dirt just near where I put the spinklers to water the plants that we are growing so maybe it was Julian after all. I forgot all about it until later that evening Tim said it wasn’t Julian and he reckons maybe it was a buffulo or wild pig. Hhmmmm…. ?? Does a pig sound like a person when they walk through the bush?? It will remain a mystery I suppose.

Less of a mystery… Tim putting his boots on this morning and his foot getting stuck and not going in the whole way. He tried again and still stuck… something in his boot perhaps? He tipped it up and out fell a dazed cane toad. I think it was already half dead from the pounding from Tim’s foot but he finished it off with a pounding from his boot. He then explained to Jordy that you should ALWAYS check in your shoes before putting them on.

A couple of days ago I ended up with my first snake kill. We’ve seen at least one or two a week since we have been here but this was the first that I spotted. I was working the buffet and the area around there is well traveled so not where I would have expected a snake especially seeing as Mum and I were walking back and forth in the outdoor kitchen area all morning. But mum walked past and I was following her and right there under the plate cupboard (that is up off the ground on stainless steel legs) was a snake tail disappearing into the garden. I told Mum to stop walking and called out to Zac, who was working nearby, to see if he had a shovel. No shovel but he grabbed a mop while I watched it head towards the mesh fence. I thought we had lost it but Zac managed to reach over the fence and trap it under the mop. Nothing in the area to properly kill it with so I grabbed a golf club (one of the many can toad killing devices around the place) and had to club it to death. Zac had a good hold on it so I could properly look to see what it was; black diamonds on it’s neck and a brown stripe across it’s eyes- a western brown, the one we really don’t want to see. But there is now one less.

Apart from our animal adventures I am not sure much else is going on, but I am really enjoying the experiences that living here (and traveling in general) is giving the kids. I love that Jordy can now identify the calls of several different birds, and can recognise the difference between a whistling kite and a wedge tail eagle in flight. Even by spotlight he knows the difference between a cane toad, a green tree frog, and a brown frog and he knows which is good and which is bad. He loves spotting animal tracks and when we ride the bike past a wallaby track we have to stop so he can get out and look more closely at it. I love (in a bizarre way) that when we go into a town and use a toilet in a building (like at the library) he looks for frogs, spiders, lizards and moths and he gets disappointed when there are no ‘friends’ in the toilet cubicle. I love that Darcy is free to play in the dirt all the time, that he is learning to swim in the creek chasing fish rather than in a chlorine swimming pool, that he is addicted to sprinklers, and is able to water the garden surprisingly well!





Ran out of time! But it works (though it is really slow!!!!) so hopefully I will be able to update again soon.

working, working...

Well, I had a whole blog entry and I just deleted it. So now I have the shits and I am trying to remember what I wrote about…

It’s been a busy week with Tim working between 10 and 12 hours a day. He’s been in the kitchen mostly and they do some great desserts here and, amongst other stuff, Tim has been learning to cook those this week All the food is really yummy but the desserts they make are REALLY good! Especially the mango cheesecake. Yum yum yum yum yum! :) There is not a chance of us loosing any weight while we are working at the café. :)

In between working and eating we’ve still had time to do a few bits and pieces. Last night Tim went with Dad and Zack out to a billabong just a few km away from here. Dad and Zack had caught quite a few red claw there the other day so they went back to put some more traps in. Zack threw a line in while Dad and Tim were putting the traps in and he caught a black bream so I imagine Tim will spend an afternoon or two back there in the future. While they were heading through the bush to the billabong they also spotted a wild black pig. Tim is not here to remind me how the story goes but apparently Tim was out front and he had a knife… and there was much creeping and hiding behind trees involved but for now the pig is still very much alive and we had steak and vegies for dinner. I am sure the blokes are convinced the pig’s days are numbered.

This morning Jordy, Darcy, Jasmine and I followed Zack down to the little creek that runs behind the café to put some more yabbie traps in there for red claw. It’s only a small creek and although it flows strongly it’s all bushy and overgrown and there is no way in hell I would swim in it… even though the chances of a croc right here are slim a bloke was attacked a few weeks ago in a nearby river so…. Anyway, there is a little waterhole here and we got a few small red claw about 12-15cm long so they are going to put them in a fish tank and let them get a bit bigger. No idea if it even works that way but they are happy fisherpeople playing with it anyway.

Jordy is excited at the moment about his plants that are growing up big real fast. J Dad planted some vegie seeds a few days ago and overnight the wombok seedlings were already up. So each morning we have to go see how big they are getting. I think it’s great cos Jordy really loved our garden at home.

We have not had a chance to get to any of the other Litchfield NP attractions. Although I’ve driven past them I still have not called into the Magnetic Termite Mounds, and we have not seen the other main waterfalls, or Blythe Homestead or anything else. In between the couple of hours work I do each day and general kid-raising stuff I just have not had the time. It will only get busier here at the café though so I’ll have to make time soon.

One highlight of this week was meeting a family that we camped near way back at Calliope; Michael, Michelle, and their five girls. They have been traveling and working around Australia for three years. They are staying north of Litchfield and called into the café for breakfast to start their tour of the NP. Because it was early in the day I had the kids with me while I was working in the garden and as soon as Jordy saw all the kids he was off wanting to play. It took a while of chatting before we made the connection that we had met them before (the kids had played together at Calliope but the adults never properly met) but after that we spoke for about another hour.

Funnily enough we also ran into them again that afternoon when we went out to the creek for a swim. We had mentioned to them that it was a great safe place for children to swim and they had headed there on their way home. So the kids all got to swim and play together again and they had a ball and Tim had a chance to have a proper conversation with them too.

We were joined later by a group of people from overseas (Germanic accents but no idea more than that) and after they had a swim one of the women grabbed her guitar and sat on the little bridge and played and sang a few songs. It was a lovely way to spend the afternoon.

I’m not sure when Tim and I will get a few days off…. I had to bring a fridge in to Darwin and am taking another one back for work so Mum came with me and we bought the kids in for a change of scene so it’s just a quick trip in. Although I will HAVE to find time to get my legs waxed…. Should I post a before pic? There a lots of ants here and they get stuck in my leg hair. Maybe guys just deal with that but I am not enjoying it.

It’s been really hot and muggy here the last couple of days, not sure exactly but past 35‘ for sure. Almost back to wet-season weather. No idea if it is building to rain or not but I think it has bought the bugs out with it. They are everywhere once it gets dark. Luckily by then the kids and I are rarely out of the van. Apart from the ants and bugs! we have also caught (killed) a few snakes around camp. We keep an eye out for them all the time with the kids cos a bite from a Western Brown could possibly kill a child so we are very aware of them and the kids wear gumboots if they are walking anywhere that is not right beside us.

another toy for the boys

We bought a boat. Not the great value one that we looked at on the weekend. Missed out on that by half a day! LOL! But a similar one for a bit less with a few less extras. It's not a proper car-topper so Tim is setting things up for it to carry above the truck on the roll bars he had made. We'll have to add a service to the motor to our list of things to do.

I still need to get mattresses organised. The innerspring from Jayco and the one for Made to Measure are essentially the same price. MtM would be a nicer bed but i'm trying to make sure they will fold ok in the expanda.

Looks like we have work lined up a the tourist season at Litchfield Cafe in Litchfiend National Park so that should be a great place to be based for a few months or more. yay! Although we know there is a lot of work around and people can just turn up to a town/area and find something we wanted to have something more reliable so i joined WorkAbout Australia so we can keep an eye on what is out there.