Next Chapter Travels

What sounded pretty straight forward in the Workaway listing turned out to be anything but. Not in a bad way, just in a very interesting, unusual and intriguing way.   Where to be begin?   Mark and Jody drove me all the way to the farm/rescue center. It is a large house sitting on 110 acres and currently houses 23 rescue wombats, ducks, birds, sheep, donkeys, dogs, and wallabies. The couple who own and run the place are in their 70’s. Lyn explained in the first five minutes that she does this work as a payback for surviving leukemia.   The couple also care for two of their grandchildren (I think they are from Don’s children). The children, 5 and 2, live here full time but occasionally visit a parent. So imagine a house where there is a high chair at the kitchen counter, a busy little 5 year old demanding attention, 12 baby wombats needing to be bottle fed, two very young wallabies needed feedings every four hours, one wombat with an injured foot who needs special care and...

Lyn Chalmers started Locky's Legacy wildlife   shelter 16 years ago. It is named after a little Brushtail possum who passed away overnight unexpectedly in his sleep. Locky’s Legacy is located approximately 10km north of Pakenham, Australia and covers approximately 5.9 hectares of hilly, native bushland with a dam and a creek running through the end of the property, providing a vital water source for wildlife.   I had the honor of helping with the animals for one short week in November 2023. One of the baby wombats died yesterday. He had been found in its mother’s pouch after she had been hit by a car. The death of a baby wombat that has been rescued wouldn't be particularly noteworthy in the bigger scheme of things. This one was a little different story. Lyn had taken Tom (not his real name) in when he was quite young. She bottle fed him and cared for him along with the dozen other baby wombats in her care at the time. Lyn is an immensely caring person and believes every anima...

Kookaburras and cockatoos are setting the background track this evening. A storm rolled in after I got back to the Discovery Holiday park. I decided to not go back to town for dinner as planned. I am feeling sort of lost between the layers. Steamboat in Echuca I could fly to somewhere outside of Australia and re-enter for another 90 days. It is oddly appealing and yet I wonder if that is just me responding to Jody’s enthusiastic suggestion that I go help her daughter with the house build. I could. I would be expensive. I also feel like I should go home. Arriving home on December 5th, I will probably only be there three months before going to South Africa.   I like helping people with projects. Getting to Mark’s house and having Jody so excited to get a little help in her garden felt really good. I weeded a couple of hours and she was so happy to have it done, we spent the whole next day working together. It was fun, plain and simple.   Just like clearing out Kelly’s greenhouse...

Passport missing?!?! All packed up and ready to leave the Ashbolt Farm, I went to do the regular visual check of passport and vital documents.Standard operating procedure, I do it every time I leave a place. This time it is not standard; I can’t find the passport or the passport holder with the Nexus Card or my vaccine record. I also can’t find the back-up wallet with the back-up credit card. I tore everything apart three times. I searched drawers, I searched the entire little cabin. None of it is there. It must be at the Airbnb in Hobart, right? Tried to call. This is the day that the entire Optus network is down. The VP of Optus got fired for the massive outage. What it meant to me was that instead of heading north, I took the bus all the way back to Hobart to see if the passport was in a drawer in room #2. It wasn’t. I took everything out of everything two more times.  Fast forward - I racked my brain, asked the host to search, went through my things a few more times, racked my...

I want to try to capture how bazar this workaway gig has been. I’m going to try to tell it backwards to not lose the oddness of today. At dinner last night, I asked what A would like done today. She was unclear and provided nothing specific for me to work from. When I got back from the Mona Museum, she was on hands and knees weeding one of the front flower beds Spencer and Kelsey and I had weeded. Some stalks of grass were bothering her. As she had said MANY times before - you have to pull them before they go to seed or they become a bigger problem. I refrained from voicing the obvious- the yard is surrounded by this grass. Pulling a few more in the flower bed is not going to make a difference. Compared to the tarp loads of weeds we had pulled out, she had only a small collection. Still, I was offended and a little irritated for about 2 seconds. At dinner last night, I asked what A would like done today. She was unclear and provided nothing specific for me to work from. When I got back...