Sarah's boss, Karen has been talking about getting us out into "the country" ever since we touched ground in Australia. Karen is a country girl growing up in the small town of Clifton where she went to school with 17 other classmates. This is Outback Queensland, which to the American eye is farmland. Like all things Australian, it is just a little different from what we are used too. For starters, we picked real cotton and down the road was a peanut farm, hell we even went to an olive farm! It is also wine country which we trekked a couple hours out to the Granite Belt and spent a day sampling decent wines and liquors. It was a family fun weekend spending time with Karen's family listening to stories and learning more about Australian culture. They are a fun group who remind me so much of Sarah's family, we fit right in except for our valley girl accents. One drunken night, I was even talked into eating some kind of alive worm that looked like a maggot. The pan fried ones with garlic were much better, but I ended up chucking two lives ones down for the pride of America. Her brother in law is a bit of a jokester and I think he pulled one on me saying they were something Aussies ate, but really they were probably something that the Aboriginals did. We did a country pub crawl and hit all the pubs in a couple towns next to each other which was a surprise of cozy bars with pretty good eating. The highlight for me was waking up at 6am, jumping in a Nissan Patrol 4WD and cruising down a dirt country road with low trees on both sides looking for Kangaroos as the sun was rising. It really felt like what my head has been telling me what "The Outback" is. Sometimes the most simple activities are the most memorable, and hunting down roo's on a dirt road felt like the most Australian thing I have done since I have been here.
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