A Weekend on the Farm

One of my colleagues, Christine, owns a farm in Inverloch, Gippsland area, a few kilometers south of Phillip Island and she invited a couple of us from the lab ( Julie, Mansur, Sebastian, Scott, Me) to spend a weekend with her in her farm. Julie and Christine are French, Mansur is Libyan, Seb is from Germany and Scott is an Aussie. Quite a multicultural gang.
We left the lab around 5pm on Friday and we only reached her farm around 8:30 due to heavy traffic in the M1 freeway. It was my first time having Raclette that night for dinner and i really liked it. According to Christine and Julie, Raclette is a winter meal common in France, Switzerland and some European countries. There's even a special machine for this dish, called a Raclette grill (what else?) and it looks like this.

See the spatula thing. Everyone has their own spatula. The basic idea is to put a slice of cheese on the spatula and put the spatula on the grill to melt the cheese. As the cheese melts you scrape it off (the word "raclette" comes from the French word "racler," which means "to scrape") and put it on your boiled potatoes. It results to something like this. Looks yummy right? While waiting for the cheese to melt, we snacked on assorted olives, cold ham and salami and baguette with salted French butter. French food galore~ I'm not admiting to liking everything because there are some stinky cheese that was just too strong and i'm still not fond of olives, but salted butter and peppercorn with stuffed Feta and salami was yummy. We basically had the olives, ham and salami, butter and cheese with baguette as an appetizer every meal. Must be the French way.
After dinner, we watched the opening ceremony of Olympics before retiring to bed. The next morning, we woke up around 10 and had breakfast of scrambled eggs with ham made by Sebastian. We then put on our boots and headed for the tour of her farm. Her farm is huge, i forgot the hectar numbers but it was really big. She rears around 200 angus cattle, this cattle is bred for their meat. The weather on Saturday was awesome and there were sunny skies with white puffy clouds as we all walked around the farm, climbing and jumping the fences to get across. We saw wombat holes along the way but as wombat are nocturnal, we did not see any wombats.

Scott fed the cow with hay. It took him a while because the cows were quite afraid of him but he finally succeeded.

Group Picture!

L to R : Julie, Me, Seb, Scott, Christine. I share an office in the lab with Seb, Scott and Christine. Always feel like a dwarf beside Seb and Scott. :)

And not forgetting Mansur. Here's a picture of him and Seb relaxing by Christine's warm and cozy fireplace. :)

After the tour of the farm, we went back to the house and took the car to drive around to the town of Inverloch, stopping at many beaches along the way like the Caves, Eagles Nest and then heading to the town and the Inverloch Jetty. We stopped for 3 minutes at each destination. C's intention was to show us all of the attractions and we could then decide what we wanted to do on Sunday. The picturesque Inverloch Jetty: - definitely will go there in Summer again

We then went home to the farm and C took the Ute (something like a pick up truck) and drove around the farm around 5ish to look for wild kangaroos. We managed to see 5 of them, happily hopping around, with no care in the world. They were very different from kangaroos that i've seen in sanctuaries or zoos because they had a vast land and thus was able to use their strong feet and hop for a long distance. We then retired for dinner (barbecue), a little bit of Olympics on tv and then bed.

On Sunday, we woke up and got ready for the great day planned. Had breakfast of thin pancakes with bananas courtesy of Seb again. We were walking to the beach and suddenly there was a downpour and we were soaked and drenched. Thankfully, Seb came to our rescue with the ute and drove us home. It rained the whole day on Sunday and we built a fire and stayed indoors most of the time until it was time to go back to Melbourne around 5.

Christine's house is awesome. I loved the way she decorated the place. This is the room where i slept.I love the four poster bed and her indian theme for this room.In summary,it was a great weekend. It would have been better if it didnt' rain on Sunday so we could enjoy the picturesque walk along the beach but I shall keep that for next time. I do not mind renting a car to go there again because the view is awesome.