Well, this weekend was the much anticipated Yeppoon Show! When you see “The Show”, that’s what we think of as a Fall Fair. But they’re A BIG DEAL here (in Queensland, at least – agricultural area) – there’s a public holiday when the town/city you work in has The Show! The Yeppoon Show is on Sat and Sun, so no holiday, but the Rockhampton Show is on Thursday, meaning I get that day off work. How crazy is that! There were fireworks on Sat night and because our Airbnb is up hill from the show grounds, we wandered over and plonked our camping chairs at the end of the street and got a great view:
Today we wandered down to the show to see how it compares to our fall fairs. Mostly similar – a midway, lots of games and fair vendors, fruit and veg competitions, art competitions, woodworking show, etc. Also a very cute petting zoo with goats, calves, guinea pigs, ducklings, puppies:
There was an “incident” while we watched the kids with the kids – a goat got himself into the guinea pig cage! Quite the uproar because he really had to squeeze himself in there and then seemed to quite enjoy it and didn’t want to come out. The guinea pigs were not impressed.
We watched the cattle show for awhile (I’ve determined this is pretty much a beauty show for cows but fortunately the cows don’t seem to know that). My favourites were the ones with floppy ears and fuzzy ears (but apparently ear floppiness and ear fuzziness are not included in the cow beauty criteria):
We were very disappointed that there were no show chickens! Here they call chickens “chooks” and owning hens for eggs is very common – so I was sure we’d see some amazing chickens like we’d see at Ontario fall fairs, but alas, no chooks at all :(. We’re going to go to the Rocky Show on Thursday and we are hopeful we’ll see some fancy chooks there.
New to the show this year was dog high jumping. But in keeping with the gambling culture down here, it started with a calcutta! There was an auction on each of the dogs entered in the competition. It was a no brainer to bet on the border collies – Hugh chose one of them – but I went the road less traveled. Unfortunately, the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason and my pup ended up middle of the pack while Hugh’s came in 2nd to the other border collie. The winning dog jumped 2 metres!
The dog Hugh chose is on the left and mine is on the right. I think it is important to point out that Hugh’s dog required one owner to run alongside him while his other owner stood with treats at the top of the jump. My dog, in contrast, happily jumped without any help. So really, my dog outperformed Hugh’s. Too bad it wasn’t judged like figure skating.
A highlight of the show was the Crack Up Sisters! Would definitely watch them anytime they’re in town.
While watching the show, we enjoyed a potato tornado with chicken salt:
We’ve seen chicken salt all over the place here but because it sounds sort of gross, we hadn’t tried it. Finally today Hugh got up the nerve to try it on deep fried potato and it was VERY tasty! In unrelated news, I’ve been drinking water non-stop since.
We were at the show early so this wasn’t open when we walked by but I took a photo because of how curious it looked:
We bumped into new friends Leigh and Darren while watching the dog high jump and they filled us in on the young fellow driving this tractor around the country. He’s called the Travelling Jackaroo – check out the great causes he’s fundraising for.
We met Leigh and Darren on Friday night at an 80’s music bingo night at the Capricorn Tavern. What a fun night! We were given bingo cards and then as they played songs from the 80’s, you crossed them off on your card. Our table was given dud cards, not a single winner all night, but we met some great people and have new friends because of it. Leigh and Darren were a hoot, they had us laughing all night, terrific sarcastic Aussie sense of humour! And Leigh and Hugh hit it off because they are both retired and could commiserate about how difficult their days are, oy vey. Leigh and Darren are standing to Hugh’s and my right in this photo:
Most of the songs we recognized (those of you who know me know that I still live in the 80’s when it comes to music so I was in my element!). But then there were a bunch of Aussie bands we had never heard of before. Check out some of our bingo cards to see if you recognize all the songs/artists:
We therefore spent Sat night going down an 80’s Aussie music rabbit hole on YouTube! We highly recommend watching some Skyhooks videos, these guys are whacked (and therefore very entertaining :)). We also recommend Slim Dusty – sort of like Canada’s Stompin’ Tom. EVERYONE sang along to the Slim Dusty song Duncan – and now that we’ve watched the video, we’ll be able to as well :). In the bars, you just insert the name of someone at your table and find a rhyming lyric to include with it.
It turns out that our first 2 purchases in Australia were, unbeknownst to us, VERY Australian. First, the car we chose was an Outback (that one was obvious). Second, we named her Matilda – Tilly for short (those of you who know me know that I always name my cars). We didn’t realize that Waltzing Matilda is pretty much Australia’s national anthem! And then our house is on Coolibah Street – and the Coolibah tree is in the song Waltzing Matilda! Click here to hear Slim Dusty singing Waltzing Matilda.
Speaking of Hugh’s difficult life as a retiree, one of his golfing buddies took him out on his boat on Friday and they went to Keppel Island:
Keppel Island is a must visit place just off the coast of Yeppoon, so hopefully one day I’ll get to see it too…
Hugh also went out on Saturday morning to help the Pickleball club set up the new courts (at least I think he was helping – maybe he just took photos :))
The new courts look fabulous BUT the kitchen lines are out by 25-100mm on 5 of the 6 courts and the nets aren’t long enough. So the club has to get in touch with the line painter and net supplier and that will delay the opening of the new courts. Hopefully they’ll be done before the big comp (that’s what they say here for tournament/competition) in July.
This afternoon the Keppel Blues Club had a jam session at the RSL so we stopped by for a drink and to enjoy the local talent. “RSL” stands for Returned Services League – essentially the equivalent of our Legion:
It’s one of the few (only?) bars/cafes that don’t have gambling machines. Fabulous covered patio with the live music (it was packed, couldn’t get a good photo), menu looked good and reasonably priced, drinks also reasonably priced. We bought a bunch of draw tickets to support the RSL – and we won! Twice! Both times we won legs of lamb:
Not a bad return on investment :). Now Hugh has to learn how to cook a leg of lamb.
Once again, I thought we didn’t have much to report on this week but I’ve managed to fill up lots of space, so better call it a day and save some items for next week. Will wrap up with one of those little differences. Everything here is in metric. You might occasionally hear reference to inches or feet, but it’s very much fully metric here. At home, if we order shaved ham or other deli items, the prices are shown per 100 g – here they’re shown per kg (almost had a heart attack when I first saw the prices, before realizing they were per kg). And at home if we measure with a ruler, we measure in cm – but here it’s in mm. We needed to buy a fridge for our new house and its dimensions are 1715 x 790 – this means constant mental math to have any clue how big something is!