Mad Days in the Madhouse!

Wow! Australia Day - how did you get here so fast? I feel like I blinked and lost a month.

Things have been a bit mad in the Madhouse, hence the lack of posting. But now I am back - at least briefly.

So, how bonkers did it get? Think Bedlam on a full moon...

• The huskafloof went down with an injury to his right rear quadrant the weekend before Christmas. Vet management plan is in effect since Christmas Eve.
• We got a new puppy - Mia. Picked her up Christmas Eve. She will be trained and re-homed. We planned/arranged her before Stinker went down. It was a case of 'someone take her or dire consequences'. So we took her.
• We got something like 7 job offers. We were set to take 1, then another came up and we took that. More on that later.
• This job is ending. The feed is so scarce that the property is being de-stocked in March.
• Water problems. The bore runs through our place to the neighbours; several have been having water issues.
• Not a day under 40Celcius in 6 weeks.
• Snakes - bloody snakes. Eastern browns - 10 in 2 weeks. And a bandy-bandy hubby nearly stepped on.
• Burnt out cars - boss' car caught fire 15km from the homestead in the middle of the night.
• New job/moving/all the stuff THAT entails.

Most of that is pretty self-explanatory. This job ends March because so much stock died/had to be shot last winter due to lack of forage. The huskafloof's injury remains a mystery, 14 hours to the required vet specialist, who is on holiday until February. So we manage him.

The new job is 36000 km away in the goldfields of WA - on a donking great cattle station (2.5million acres total). We will be caretaking one of the 4 homesteads. While it is a long way from our family, the offer was too good to pass up. So we are off at the end of next month.

The job we were going to take - well, we had it down to 2. One was an hour south of Townsville, caretaking. The other was in Maryborough, about an hour from Hervey Bay. Also caretaking. Other contenders were a caretaking position in NSW, and a couple on the Maranoa (where we are now). The WA job we didn't even apply for, it found us through word of mouth.

I am packing everything up for the move already. We have soaping ingredients we've carted from place to place for 4 years; no more. So we are making soap to use some up (it stinks, it is not the pretty smells I like, but it works wonders for hubby's exczema/dermatitis).

So that is where I have lost a month to madness. And now ewe have only 31 days to departure for our next adventure...

So Many Places... My (Aussie) Bucket List

Since picking up the bus in Mawson Lakes (ADL) in 2012, we have seen many places, and we still haven't seen 100th of Australia.

Nonetheless, I have a Bucket List for places I want to see in Australia. It includes:

• Pink lakes - any or all... there's one in WA, another in SA and another in I *think* Victoria. Or that could be NSW - it was dark and we'd been driving for hours when I spotted the sign.

• Any and all painted silos - we've seen a few of these and I'd really like to get to all the others. The one at Weethalle NSW was brilliant, as were Patchewollock and Brim Silos
  
  
  

• Fraser Island.

• I would LOVE to climb Uluru, but that won't happen. I'll settle for seeing the sun set over the Rock.

• The Sydney Opera House in the Festival of Lights.

• The Aurora Australis. Have to go back to Tassie for that: back to Cockle Creek!

• Ida Bay Railway. Went there as a child, it was in ruins; restored now.

• Puffing Billy again. Had a blast on my first trip.

•  Broome - Cable Beach. Pearls.

• Darwin.

• Kuranda Butterfly House. I loved the little one at Coffs Harbour.

• Mount Gambier again. Blue Lake (it really is that colour, no filters) and Umpherstone Sinkhole.

• Seal Rocks NSW. Beautiful; I'd love to go here again.

•  Murray River 3 or 5 day cruise on a paddle steamer. My Pop did one in the 80's and loved it.

• WA wildflowers.

• Coober Pedy.

• Melbourne again and again and again... Eating exclusively at Crossways (Krishna eatery).

• Great Ocean Road - again. Loved it the first time, even though we were sleeping on the seats of the bus with no AC in 40+ degrees.

• Werribee Estate - the gardens! The mansion!

• Exmouth WA - because I can.

• Mon Repos - baby turtles!

• A sugar cane burn - iconic Aussie experience.

• Ettamogah Pub - I will endure the Sunshine Coast for this.

• Kakadu because it is meant to be beautiful.

• Great Barrier Reef - another Aussie icon. 

• Tamworth - for Dad. 

This is a bit of a *cheat* post. I am writing it at 1 a.m. as I get ready to head out on a 2 week no-phone-no-internet muster. It is, nonetheless, my actual Bucket List, or at least, part thereof. And it gives me an excuse to look at my photos :) I'll schedule it to upload while I am away and get into a rhythm of proper posts once I am home again.

Welcome to the Mobile Madhouse Blog!

Hello there! So glad you stopped by.

I'm Rosie (Rosita) and I'm the only sane one in this place. Well, maybe sane isn't the right word - maybe 'least disturbed'...

This place is the Mobile Madhouse: me, hubs, a kelpie, a kelpie-dingo, a husky and a psychotic, sociopathic rainbow lorikeet. We have no set home, we travel and work. All the time, it's what we do.

Right now (November 2018) we are in the Maranoa region of Queensland, on 65,000 acres of red dust. It's a cattle station, and it is DRY! Well, sort of. We got 50mm of rain 5 days ago, and bits are starting to green, the dams are all at least half full and the livestock are happy; that's the story on the northern end of the place. To the south, even though it got 45mm, it looks much the same as it did before the rain, except the dams have more water in them; there is no green.

We (T and I) have been doing this since 2014; we sold up all our stuff and bought a bus in Adelaide in 2012. We drove back Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road, sleeping on the bus seats on the side of the road, seeing the sights and meeting some lovely people.

Back in Tasmania after a freezing trip back on the Spirit of Tasmania, sleeping in seats (never again), we parked up in our son's driveway, stripped out the seats and windows, put in a few cupboards, a table, a bed, lights and power points and hit the road. And then we made good our escape. We made sure to get a cabin on the Spirit when we did it - I meant it when I said never again! When we got to Melbourne, we flipped a coin and headed up the east coast to Queensland. I'll take you on that journey through photos at a later point.

Since then, we've rattled around bits of southern Qld, and spent 10 months in SA. We've been gifted another grandson (we already had one of those when we left Tassie), and two of our children have become engaged. The dogs and bird also came on board; the bird is a Queenslander, as is the kelpie. The kelpie-dingo is a Victorian (like T) and the husky is a South Aussie. In spite of our disparate backgrounds and vastly different personalities, we make it work.