Day 291 - Boulder. You really do seem to be living in the past when you are in Western Australia, can you believe that the shops don't open on Sunday, not even Coles or Woolworths. I keep forgetting, so it looks like dinner tonight will be a dozen tinnies and a packet of crisps.

More Baked Beans information, I was in Woolies the other day and I noticed that they put the tins of baked beans between "Canned Vegetables" and "Tinned Meals", obviously they cannot make up their mind where they should go, I don't think sitting on the fence is the way to go. Speaking of Woolies have you noticed that they no longer have pictures of some of the bakery products in their self checkout systems. This makes it quite difficult because I don't normally have a clue what I have purchased and relied on the pictures to help me, so I just take the cheapest option. Coles by the way still has pictures for it bakery products.

Just to give you an idea of the people I meet here is a selection of the people I have met in the last 2 days. I don't parlez vous the francais, in fact I only know enough french to help me with clues in the SMH cryptic crossword. So it was a good thing that the french couple, Marion and Samuel, spoke fluent english. Like me they took time off from their jobs to travel around Australia, unlike me though they have to find work to pay their way. They seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. Then there was the bloke who drove ore trains, 3 kilometres long, 230+ carriages and 30,000 tonnes of iron ore, He explained to me about the what you do when half your train is going uphill and the other half is going downhill. Then a women who was a receptionist at a brothel and was going to one of the brothels in Kalgoorlie to say hello. Then the husband and wife gold fossickers from New Zealand, the biggest nugget he has found was 10oz, about $14,000 worth in todays prices. They spend half of the year fossicking and the half in New Zealand. A couple wo had just finished 3 months at the Eyre birdwatching camp, you can look it up to see where it is. A young American learning about the Australian wine industry, his car ad blown a head gasket and he was waiting to see what could be done to repair it. He thought we called Americans "seppos" because they were like septic tanks, I explained to him that it wasn't that at all, it was rhyming slang, that made him feel better. Finally there was the young bloke who had cleaned up a roo and was waiting for his car to made driveable so he could continue on to Perth. Lots of very interesting conversations.