After spending the entire summer saving up our pennies and working rigorously on the van, Ryan and I packed the little we could fit into every crevasse available to commence our first trip; to Eucla.

For those unfamiliar with the Nullarbor, Eucla is located 913km from Esperance, sitting 12km from the Western Australia/South Australia border. It has a population of around 45 people and the town (if you can call it that?) is comprised of the roadhouse, police station, nursing station, community centre and houses for the permanent residents. It’s small. But, the roadhouse is the best on the Nullarbor (only slightly biased), which meant that the area was always busy with travellers stopping in for a rest or a nights stay, making the atmosphere more lively. The road house itself was big, with a service station, cafe, restaurant, bar, motel rooms, caravan park, a pool and outdoor area and even a yard for travelling horses. Ryan and I were here to work in the roadhouse for a month or two in order to re-earn some of the money we had spent on building Michmouse.

It’s difficult to know what to expect when you’re starting a new job, but I can guarantee that neither Ryan or myself were expecting to gain a large Spanish family from our time here. It’s not easy to articulate what working that remote is like, but I can tell you that when you have a crew as close as ours, it wasn’t hard. It kind of felt like being at a school camp, all of us sharing the same experience that only we would really understand. We all worked together, lived in the same section and spent our free time together.

Our time spent in Eucla can be broken down into what we did during our shifts and how we spent our time off;

During our shifts: Ryan spent majority of his time working as a handy-man with Gerardo; painting doors, driving the forklift to unload deliveries, organising fuel deliveries, fixing pipes and windows, weeding the garden and maintaining the fuel. He usually worked from around 6am to 2pm. I often did a split shift, cleaning motel rooms in the morning from 8am to 11am, before a few hours break, returning for the bar shift at around 3pm. Because our shifts usually wouldn’t align, Ryan and I spent our free time differently. I would sleep in a little more, work later into the night and spent my hours between shifts reading a new book or playing the Nintendo switch to finally understand the hype around Animal Crossing. After Ryan would finish work he would usually go to the community centre to use the gym before grabbing his dinner and winding down.

I really enjoyed my split shift, getting to listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I cleaned the rooms always started my morning off well, plus being behind the bar was by far my favourite way to serve customers. Having yarns to all the different kinds of people who were doing the drive across the Nullarbor always fascinated me. Where they were coming from and where they were going was an easy conversation starter and led to interesting conversations that meant the hours would usually fly by. I also got to work with both the morning and afternoon crew everyday so I was able to get to know everyone quickly.

Our time off: On our days off together, Ryan and I would most often spend the morning at the community centre, having a couple of games of tennis and maybe a quick workout before heading to the cafe for lunch. If the day was warm we would also go for a swim in the pool to cool off before heading home to the A-Frame. The afternoons usually involved playing a number of different games, usually cards or catan, before jumping on the nintendo switch to play super mario bros or crash bandicoot together. Once we got bored of that we would grab dinner and come home to chuck on a thriller or documentary before calling it a night. It sounds simple, but these were my favourite days.

But… we also managed to find time to do other things

such as;

Celebrate many a birthdays (Christobal’s being an absolute highlight), try Pesco, play catan with Cristobal and Claudia, go cave diving in the Weebubbies caves with Ania and Gerry (probably one of my favourite adventures out there), check out the dunes for sunset, watch Franco almost get into a fisty cuffs with a guest, crochet and then unstitch my first bucket hat, have a couple too many drinks with Chantelle, Jess and Jules, try and retry to quit nicotine (unsuccessful), play a lot of tennis, go to the gym (only Ryan really) and practise yoga (only me really), get excited over day off steak dinners, watch the entire wolverine movies series, shutdown the whole till system (on my first shift), meet a bunch of nice customers and bunch of not so nice ones, have beers around the campfire, drink many glasses of red wine, try our best at duo-lingo and learn a couple chilean swear words, get fizzed for delivery days, complete sudokus lounging by the pool, read a couple books and listen to some audibles, watch a crow drink milk and Gerry drink dishwashing liquid, explain to a customer that all of our rooms are indeed snake-free, have a free dental exam and a couple much needed visits from mates (cheers Dom, Lili and Robbie).

Just to name a few.

It was a bloody brilliant few months, and I cannot wait to be reunited with everyone again, in this country or not.

Chupalo,

The Spy.

Special mention to Chantelle, Gerardo, Ania, Claudia, Christobal, Franco, Begonia, Macarena, Katerina, Fabrizio, Javi, Matias, Raylene, Jules, Jess, Johno and Kirk. We love you guys.