Zucchini Picking in Laidley

So here's the deal. We needed to find a job not only because money goes faster over here than you would expect and second of all we had a gap in our meet up times by about a week so we figured we would just make a little quick cashola...

So we applied to the Harvest Hotline. A job organization in Australia for backpackers or anyone really who is interested in doing farming work. Alot of foreigners who are applying for a second year visa are REQUIRED to do 3 full months of fruit picking/harvest work. So we filled out othe applications and got all of our info together, set up an aussie bank and got the details together. We ended up getting a job on a farm in Laidley a town about 1.5 hours (I want to say) west of Brisbane. We were in Brissy when we found the job opportunity. Eddy the guy at the farm told us we needed to be in Laidley that evening because we would have to begin our zucchini picking work the next morning at 4:15am. Hahah...thats crazy right. So we packed our belongings and we were off on a Greyhound bus to Laidley farm country. When we arrived at the bus stop 2 fellow harvester's were there to meet us. They took us back to the hostel which they call home. They (Emily and Chris from scottland) had been working at the farm for 2 months. So we crashed early the night we arrived, we wanted to make sure that we had energy to wake up and work hard the next morning.
When we woke up at 4:15am the next morning we were suddenly informed that work was canceled due to the rain. We were kinda bummed considering we were on this one week mission to make some good money. Sarah and I decided to stay awake to get our bodies accustom to the major change in wakeup time. The entire day it rained. The hostel had movies you could watch so that day we watched a grand total of 8 movies. Very productive day I must say. However we were able to catch up on our journals and a little reading time here and there. By the end of the evening we were tired from waking up so early so we crashed at about 10pm. Once again we woke up early at the 4:15 alarm. We got dressed in our dirtiest clothing, it was supposed to be an extremely muddy day. We left the hostel at about 5:00am headed to the farm and begun our days work at 6:30am. The farmer who was there to greet us seemed friendly, focused, and ready to have an easy Sunday working day. He told us that we would probably only work for 4-5 hours because he wanted the day off. We drove in a tractor out to the zucchini fields, with our latex gloves and 5gal buckets...we were ready to rock. There were about 60 rows of zucchini's which made up 2 patches. We had a group of 4 pickers to split that between. The row's were extremely long to my surprise. Our first line wasn't so bad, neither was our second...then our backs started hurting, our boots were caked with wet mud and we could hardly lift them out of the ground. After picking 2 tractor bins of zucchini we were aloud a 15 minute break. Then back to work it was for more zucchini picking in the hot sun. We filled another 2-3bins and then it was lunch time. We had a half hour lunch which seemed like it was about 5 minutes. We ended up working in the hot sun until about 5:30pm and then we went back to the hostel. By that time Sarah and I had established that we thought the job was a waste of time and absolutly rediculous. When we returned to the hostel we discussed how we felt about continuing the job. We both wanted to speak with our parents to see what they thought, but it was late at home and so we waited until the morning. I thought for sure once I told my dad that there was zero sun protection he would second the idea of us quitting. HA! Was I ever wrong. His response to the sun was oh..."what I would reccomend doing is purchasing one of those longsleeve button up shirts and a big straw farmer hat!" My immediate thought was...that went well. After both speaking to our parents and knowing that they supported either decision we would make...we decided to quit. Our bodies felt like we aged 50 years overnight and we figured were on vacation we don't have to do something we don't like. So we quit.

All in all I'm sure we could have completed the weeks worth of very hard work...but it just wasn't worth it to us. Now we plan to look for work in Sydney and hang around that area for about a month.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving...your in our thoughts! Happy holidays and will someone PLEASE go drink a pumpkin spice late for me!

CHEERS