Mine!

Nick's mine - as it was left in July ...

Nick and Vaughan inspected the "mine" the morning after our arrival, cleared the overgrowth of prickly shrubs and re-commenced digging!

They had visited the mine several times when the pic at left was taken, marking progress to that point.

As the hole was becoming fairly deep, the rusty tin was left as a marker to stop any fossickers falling in! 

Given the heat of the summer though it was generally only Nick in the fossicking area - and he worked in the early morning and later afternoon.

Not bluffing!

Us on the Bluff (with another bluff in the background)

On one of our first trips up to the Bluff, I remembered my drum was at home. 

Although disappointed, I soon realised that the many (and hyper-active) summer-time ants would have rendered meditative drumming impossible!

O Christmas Tree

Our plan was for a simpler Christmas, so our decorations were much fewer than usual but with a Yowah-ish theme - colourful lizards, frogs, bugs and grasshoppers (with some smaller baubles for good measure)!

During the course of our stay we discovered various real bugs roosting in the tree also!

Christmas count-down

Reindeer?!

We continued unpacking the next day and fortunately Nick was able to fix Elmer's tyre (with some assistance). The telling of our goat-chasing adventure provided much amusement all round!

Given we were going away for Christmas, there hadn't seemed much point in Christmas decorating at home but we deemed it necessary to add some festivity to Louie's shack!  Our solar-powered Christmas lights were strung (or spiked) and in the cool of the evening we all went up to the Bluff to select not one but two Christmas tree - one for the main living area and one for the front of Erin's tent.

Christmas lights were a novelty!

Although the instructions had indicated we might have to wait a couple of days for our Christmas lights to be sufficiently charged, they were already working when we returned from our Christmas tree gathering - and looked so pretty!

Get a geek at this!

Nick and Vaughan had headed over to the fossicking area after lunch - and found this gecko in a rusty bucket near Nick's "mine".

It was the first of many spotted/caught during our month-long stay.  (They were much faster in the summer weather)!

You chase one goat herd!

We made it home after 7 or 8 stops ...

We unpacked quite thoroughly before heading up to the Bluff - where we had lots of fun hooning cross-country in pursuit of a large wild goat herd. I managed only a few pics of the goats because I was laughing too much (and the ride was fairly rough for photography)!

All good things come to end though and it became obvious when we stopped that the goats were having the last laugh - Elmer's front left wheel had been staked in the chase.

Remember our thorough unpacking?!  Yep, we had been so thorough that although the high-lift jack was available for tyre-changing, there were no tools on hand to unfasten it from the roof!  Not that access to the jack mattered greatly as we hadn't been able to access the spare from beneath the truck either.

It was probably a 2-3km walk back to Louie's shack, so we came up with a plan ...

Fortunately the newly purchased air compressor was still on board, so Nick wedged it between the bull-bar and bonnet and connected it to the battery.  The two of us took turns to apply huge pressure to the substantial hole while the compressor was running (inflating the tyre).  When the tyre was deemed ready, the hose was hurriedly disconnected and we would both run to jump into the car.

(Have you seen "Little Miss Sunshine"?! While we didn't faithfully re-enact their car shenanigans, there were some similarities)!
 

The Happy Hamby Hooners?!

Nick would then drive as far/fast as possible, while I hung out the window to keep an eye on the tyre and shout "stop" when it was getting too flat.

At one point we both were hanging out our windows because the bonnet flipped up!

Green Gate

Home away from home!

We had been on the way to the public phone when we saw the emu parade.

We needed to alert Peter of our arrival but our usual mobiles have no reception at Yowah - and  our new (remote area) mobile still required credit.

The public phone coin box had been full back in July - and perhaps it hadn't been cleared since then?!  In any case the phone was not functioning - so we tried our new NextG mobile instead.

Easier said than done, there was some rigmarole involved in getting the necessary credit organised but once achieved we were able to ring Peter, who greeted us very warmly and escorted us to Louie's house (aka Green Gate), about two doors down from the house where I had lived as a kid.

Louie's house did have a green gate but the fibro sign had fallen onto the ground and cracked in several places.  Soon after arrival, Vaughan discovered a family of brown frogs living under the face-down sign!