So, this weekend Ro and I went off to have lunch with her brother, John, and his wife, Jill. John and Jill live in Canowindra, where Ro’s parents and she and Keith used to live. Ro’s three children all grew up there in the lovely river flat farmland with hills all around. So, where are the pictures, you ask? They will have to remain in my mind, since the rain was bucketing down so much we could hardly see out of the car! Everyone is simply thrilled to have the rain, after seven years of drought. Ro was amazed to see her old fields of canola – rape seed, very bright yellow – growing so well, compared to the past few years. (Keith actually grew some other kind of cattle feed when he farmed those same fields nearly thirty years ago, and it was a struggle. ) Plus, the rain will be an absolute boon to the town or Orange, where the gold mines need their dry dams filled up so they can use the water to flush out the gold ore. They used to call that panning, but I think it takes on a whole new meaning when you’re digging hundreds of feet underground using enormous machines to bring out the ore and dump it into troughs, or whatever, to be flushed. Ro’s son, Alistair, drives one of the machines that picks up the ore down in the mines and says it is completely dark down there. The only lights they have are the headlights on the machine – eery! He does that for eight hours at a time. There is another huge gold mine going to be built near here next year and so Orange is getting ready for a big expansion of housing and an influx of people. Guess who is buying most of the gold? That’s right, good old China – which is also buying all (incredible amounts) of the iron ore being dug out in Western Australia. The US might still think it’s hanging on to its richest nation in the world status, but since China owns all the US debt and is growing its own infrastructure and economy like crazy, that might not last for too much longer. Whadda ya think?
The rain did let up a bit for our tour of the lovely historic town of Canowindra and Dudley and Thelma’s farm that I stayed on for so long (now split up and owned by others) and Ro and Keith’s first house and the one they built by hand completely themselves, with a swimming pool and lovely great room with fireplace. We didn’t go in to that one, but it was on a wonderful acreage in the hills with a river running through and long, red dirt roads all around that her children biked, motorbiked and drove tractors on. It looked as though it would have been the most wonderful childhood for them. However, they did really work the fields on the tractors from a young age and so contributed to the farm work. Ro also had a local restaurant for many years, called The Lunch Bucket, that she ran by herself doing all the cooking and baking in a nearby town called Cowra. It was open every day for breakfast and lunch and the children all helped there also as they got older. It all sounds rather romantic, but I think it was a very hard working life on the land and times were often pretty hard – for the parents, anyway!
Since there are no scenic photos for you, here are some of the wonderful orange eggs we eat here (from Orange, hah, hah!) and one of Ro’s daughter, Phillipa, mixing a cake for tea. 
I will endeavour to take more photos this week. Meanwhile, I really am doing some work and we have got four more people on the Isagenix programs. The results being obtained by people here are wonderful, even though they more or less do it all wrong. You can’t tell the Aussies what to do! But, they obviously need what we have and it is making a big difference for their weight and health. Australia’s population is now the most obese in the world – overtaking the #1 position from the US. No worries, right?
I would be a little worried…if we didn’t have the answer!
