Vintner's cont'd - Blogabond

We pruned for four days plus the training day, up and ready at eight to head down to the vines with our gloves, hats, secateurs, water bottles and suntan lotion (the vines are only a three-minute max. walk from the house but it saved running back and taking our shoes on and off all day). The first morning everything was shrouded in fog, which was magical - droplets hanging off the giant spiderwebs that we strung between the lines of vines, and mist weaving through them. We prune and prune and prune, tillaround 10.30-11 am when either Marianne or Matthew bring morning tea (normally fruit, cakes/biscuits, and drinks - no-one leaves Vintner's thin, trust me!) down to where we are, which we eat sitting in the shade of Ed's truck or sitting on the truck-bed.
Then we prune some more until lunch, which we eat either in the pagoda-shelter in the front-gardens area, or in the house, always with a pot of tea on the go. Then back to the pruning! It's easy but boring work, with the added excitement of creepy-crawlies - flueorescent yellow spiders, other crawly things, the delight of flying ants. The worst luckily occurs for me on the final day, in the final hours of pruning, when I look down to find a giant (to me) hairy tarantula-type spider crawling up my leg. My, er, enthusiastic reaction drew the attention of Ed and his friend Warren, who delighted in informing me about huntsman spiders, which grow, by all accounts, massive, but luckily are barely poisonous at all, and don't spin webs for you to walk face-first into (another delight of working in the vineyard!).

In between pruning we take time to be shocked that it's August already. It's August. It's winter here. And yet it's hotter than summer back home. I'm not complaning!

In between our third and final days of pruning, we got to go on a day-trip to Brisbane with Ed. He was going there for a dental appointment, and also dropping Anna off at the meditation retreat where she was WWOOFing next. It's a 3-hour journey so we get up early for the drive, carried along by 60s classic pop and Ed's fascinating collection of country music - ranging Creedence to Cash, and from the weird and creepy to the downright crass. It's brilliant, and I laugh quietly to myself in the back seat at some of the lyrics.

Ed dropped us at the CityCat ferry stop furthest our of the city centre so we could enjoy the (windy! a skirt was not a good choice...) river journey into the city. Although Brisbane could be any-city, any-where, it's pretty enough, being on the river, and after so long in small country towns and on rural properties it was nice to be somewhere cosmopolitan again - although the sheer volume of people baffled us for a little while, as did negotiating road-crossings!
We wanderered along the cultural SouthBank area, past the museums and galleries, the faux-lagoon and beach area on the riverside, and then cross over the bridge to check out Queen's Street. This is where we ran into two of Nik's friends from Busselton. We were all bowled over by the coincidence; similar to when he ran into another of his friend's in Tully - although this was greater since we weren't even staying in Brisbane, just passing through for a few hours!

In the afternoon Ed picked us up again and took us up to Mount Coo-tha to check out a panoramic view of the city. You could see as the conical main-peak of the Glasshouse Mountains, and to New South Wales to the South. It's always interesting to see a city from above, so to speak, to get a real idea of the scale and layout. We'll be back in Brisbane in a month or so, to explore it properly, but the day-trip gave us a taster, and a welcome dose of city-life to make us appreciate arriving back, late in the evening, at the rural peace of Vintner's.

written by

LizIsHere on August 4, 2010 from Childers, Australia

from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010

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