Travels of Shepp

After a long 3 and a half months, I've finally completed my farm work!! It feels INCREDIBLE to be done. This is a moment I've been waiting and wishing for a long time, and it felt so amazingly surreal to drive home with Camilla at the end of our last day, music blasting and with the farm well and truly behind us. It's been such a strange, life-changing experience. It's the hardest work I've ever done. I never would have done something like this off my own back. Some people don't mind the actual work, but generally I hated it... Now I've reached the end, I'm so burnt out and OVER IT, I literally could not have done another day more. But what I did like was the people.  I've met so many incredible people from all across the world, got to know people so well so fast, and shared incredible as well as tough memories with everyone. All living and working together, chilling in the caravan park during the afternoons after work, and go...

Since we've just celebrated Halloween I wanted to do an appreciation post for one of my favourite times of year. Anyone who's seen any of my Instagram stories around the end of October before knows that I live for Halloween. I LOVE making my own costumes and I spend months in advance coming up with a new idea each year. Last year as the house from Spongebob Squarepants  And the year before that as a bag of jellybeans... This year I was pretty proud of myself especially considering it was done on a backpackers budget and a farmworkers effort! Anyone who compared it to the jellyfish Ernie and Bernie from Shark Tale, I thank you graciously for this honourable compliment. Recognising all this fun, I'd like to make the case for Halloween being the best holiday. All you Christmas lovers, hear me out. I love Christmas just as much as the next guy, but you can't deny there's a pressure in the lead up to Christmas. Wha...

Instagram always sugar coats everything- a highlight reel won't show the bad parts. When I'm having fun I'm having the time of my life, but when it rains it pours. (A very fitting analogy for the recent climate here.) If I'm honest, life is pretty tough at the moment. I'm 26 days away from completing my 88 on the farm, and it's never felt further away. Bad weather and huge storms recently mean that my work has been rained off for days on end and it's very difficult to find other work. This in turn means that the more work gets cancelled, the later I'll be able to finish my days. It's really disheartening when we're so desperate to get out of here and get back to what we really came for- travelling and spending quality time in this beautiful country. The frustration just seems like make the time go even slower. It has been, and will continue to be, such a huge test in perserverance and being optimistic. Work itself can be quite...

It feels like I haven't written in so long even though it's only been a couple of weeks, just because of the intensity of life here, it seems like so much has happened in the past few weeks. I'm now living in the caravan park in Gatton, a few minutes down the road from where I was previously. Most people moved from there as the rules were getting far too strict and we needed a better place to live. It's always a beautiful sunset I've been much happier at the caravan park. The atmosphere is soo much nicer, with a big communal outdoor kitchen in the middle and everyone's cabins facing it. It means we can sit outside having a beer and chatting after work, which we couldn't dream of before. It's taken me such a long time, but I do feel like I've finally settled into life in farm country. I've struggled so much with social anxiety, feeling like I don't belong here, and of course the farm work itself. Anyone that knows me knows ...

For those that don't already know, I'm beyond excited to say that I bought a campervan! This might seem like a spontaneous buy, but I had been planning to get a vehicle to travel in for after my farm work. I had fallen in love with road tripping when me and Ryley hired a campervan in July, so I knew my goal was to get one myself to do the same for more of my travels in Australia. Since then, I've spoken to a lot of different people who have had vans and bought vehicles in Australia, and all my mates here who have done similar things. I've been gathering what information I can so I can be informed to make the best decision for myself. So, last week I was talking to a friend at work about it, and it convinced me to start looking now. There was no rush, but may as well look now and if I come across something that would suit me then I'd get it. I started looking on Facebook marketplace, Gumtree and Car Sales Australia and found some lis...

I've been getting on with my farm work for a little while now, and to say life here is intense is an understatement. No matter how ready you are for it, nothing can completely prepare you. I felt like I had spoken to so many of my friends who had done or were doing farm work, got advice on how to find jobs, saw where they lived and what was good and bad, and listened to their stories about the work. But I still had no clue what to expect. And I'm doing something I never could have expected. I work in a seedlings nursery. At the moment I've been working in the grafting room, which means we cut the tops off one kind of plants and clip them to the bottoms of another kind to create a new plant. Recently I've been on the evening shift, from 1.30pm- 9.30pm. It's an intense lifestyle. In that, there's a bunch of young people all living together in close quarters doing hard but boring as hell work and then partying on the weekends. You...

Big changes have come into my life recently. Two weeks ago I was taking the kids to the park in Brisbane, and a week before that I was in Cairns jumping out of a plane. But now, I've moved out west not far from Brisbane to complete my 88 days of farm work needed to qualify for my 2nd year visa. Transformation is definitely in the air, and with new environments and experiences comes new lessons. Getting down and dirty with some hard work is a far cry from the exciting days of road tripping across the country. I was so nervous to start as everyone says how hard it is. But it's not the work itself that's hard. It's the lifestyle. It's the culture of contractors picking you up and dropping you whenever they please. It's the not knowing if you are working tomorrow until 6 in the evening. And more importantly it's the guilt and fear that comes with losing a job or not being able to find work. So far I've been here not two weeks and I...