Foxtrot Delta Papa on the Thargomindah Airstrip

The Royal Flying Doctor does a weekly visit to Thargomindah to provide medical care for the 300 or so locals and also the station people.  Our Doctor comes from the Charleville base, these days it’s a lady doctor one week and a bloke the next week.

 I think we are very fortunate to have the RFDS as our medical service as,  even on the stations, a doctor is only ever 2 or 3 hours away since we all have airstrips. We also have a large medical chest supplied by the RFDS to administer first aid from while waiting for the doctor to fly in.

So off to town yesterday for Greg to see the Doc ( he prefers the lady one), I went in for the ride and to take my library books back.  Had to also get diesel, about 600 litres at 149.9 cents a litre!  Petrol might have come back in the cities but it’s still pretty dear out here!  We also booked one of our cars in for a service with the Toyota dealer. The shop had reasonably fresh fruit and veg in so I bought some and a funny little ice block that had come all the way from Poland!  Unreal. 

Had a hamburger with an organic beef patty on it for lunch at the roadhouse.  OBE beef was formed by a group of graziers in Thargomindah 15 or so years ago and is still going strong, supplying organic beef to Japan and America and some in Australia too. We were a part of this for the first 10 years but had to relinquish our organic status in order to supplement our cattle during the drought to keep them alive.

 

 

 

On our way home we did a water run on our other place, Zenonie.  Old eagle eyes (himself) spotted a Hereford head under a tree, off the side of the road on our northern neighbour’s place, so off we go to investigate.  Sure enough it’s 2 new bulls who have taken themselves off for what they thought were, greener pastures.  Well they aren’t doing our cows any good there, so we got them moving ever so reluctantly and put them through a nearby gate back onto Zenonie.

Then we travelled the length of Z doing a water run, no great dramas today – one dead roo to be pulled out of a tank, lick blocks to be put out for the cattle, lots of gates to open and we found some of the southern neighbors’ cattle in our Bottom paddock.  They have to stay there until we muster and then we’ll try once more to get them out, but they are very wild animals and a bit hard to keep up with.

We left home at 7.30 and got back at 3, travelling about 300 kms for the day.