This weekend we had an awesome time all thanks to our friends Emma and Woody!
For those of you reading this back home, Emma is my work colleague and has the absolute pleasure of sitting next to me everyday - she's also a designer but with a few years more experience so she's like my teenage design Aunty.
Woody is her long-time awesome boyfriend who is the exact description of a real man! He has all those boy toys that everyone wants - the Land Cruiser, a job working with those MASSIVE machines like in the Avatar film, and a 20 acre block of his own Aussie Outback with it's own bar (outside)!
So after months of wet season, and buttering Emma up, they invited us out for their first weekend back out there to hang out and generally have a lazy weekend at their block in Dundee.
It takes about 2 hours to get there from the city, and you could miss it if you didn't know exactly where it was as it's so hidden. You drive up into the block and you can barely see anything for all the trees and grass - it's like you're just driving into your own forest. Then you emerge in this clearing where there's a hand built home, dunny (outside loo) and firepit. The house only has two rooms that are indoors, the kitchen, dining room, bar and toilet are all outside! It's so, so, so completely different from anything else and you can just relax - you don't have to worry about taking your shoes off or where to sit, or any of that stuff. Instead you just do want you want, in your own time and noone cares.
Greg got to drive around tied to the back of the Ute, sat on two precariously tied tyres and got dragged around to flatten all the grass to create a fire break around the entire 20 acre block. We got driven on the back of the ute to get firewood and seemed to drive for such a long time you could have your own town there!!
We were so jealous of the place! Something like that would be so hard for us to get in England it's nothing worth imagining, but these guys have these to go out to whenever they want it's amazing!
Then we all stood around pulling bathtubs from the shrubbery due to the fact we needed to cut the grass, the only issue being this was perfect snake territory and conditions, and then Woody saw what he was sure was a snake.. but it still needed to get done, so we're all stood with either cameras or shovels depending on what your intention was.
The toilet was an outdoor loo.. so that was interesting for me! I did super well and didn't wuss out for ages, even though there were little spiders all over it. However one night there was an absolutely MASSIVE spider sat on the loo, and there was no chance in hell I was going to go there - at all. Poisonous or not. It's not seeing my bottom.
We spent the nights with Emma cooking us awesome BBQed food, drinking beer, playing cards and watching 'Castle' a classic Aussie feel good film (tv is outside too!). T'was the life!
The second day we got taken to a top secret location - which is fine because if you asked me where it was I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to get there again! But at the end of this place was the most remote, secret, coolest little creek to swim in which, according to Woody "wouldn't have crocs because he's been there heaps of times, so there can't be". But I decided that keeping a look out for crocs was still very wise!
Thank you to Woody & Emma for letting us stay at Chez Woodblake!
