Grass Patch - where the hell is it?

It was with some serious nervousness that I stepped off the plane at Perth and onto a bus to Esperance. I had a nine hour journey by road to wonder at what I was doing or rather be expected to do.

I had secured a job with a family of four young children on a cropping farm in WA. I was going to be the nanny. What the hell was I thinking? Me? A nanny? That would be my sisters forte not mine, she is qualified in child care, me I'm just an administrator with a dream and a sense of adventure.

The long bus ride gave me plenty of opportunity to mull over my choices in life, and well, I'd made it this far so I was going to take the bull by the horns and run with it.

When I stepped off the bus, I was met by my employers niece (who was working for her uncle for the harvest) and after a couple of days doing a couple of mundane jobs in town for our employer we headed out onto the highway for the ride out to Grass Patch and beyond to get to the farm.

By the time we had reached the little town of Grass Patch and turned off the highway towards the farm it was already dark. We had been travelling for what felt like hours when my new friend and guide stated she couldn't find the farm; "I think I've missed it? I should have paid more attention when my Uncle drove me here."

Well of course all sorts of terrible thoughts run through my mind, and she states; "I'll turn around and we'll find the motel on the road back towards Esperance. We'll try again to find the farm in the morning."

So we turn around and head back to Esperance: now there is something you should know if you have never travelled anywhere in Australia, the roads are long, I mean really long. At at night time when you can only see as far as your driving lights illuminate, the roads seem even longer.

We drove back towards Esperance for what felt like hours before my friend piped up; "I can't find the motel and I'm running out of fuel. I'm going to pull over, we'll have to sleep in the car, and we will try again in the morning."

Well what could I say? So we settled into the car after finding a spot out of the way near a water pumping station in an unknown township somewhere between Esperance and Grass Patch. All sorts of thoughts were running through my mind, least of all the fact that I had watched Wolf Creek not long before I left England!

Early the next morning we awoke, alive, untouched and somewhat stiff and sore. We started the car once more, started heading towards Esperance again in search on the elusive fuel station, only to find it a minute up the road from where we had spent the night. And what was beside the fuel station? Thats right, the motel.

After waiting for them to open, we fuelled up, agreed to never speak of this again (oops) and we headed back to Grass Patch once more.

In the cold hard light of day it didn't seem so long to get back to the point of the road where we had turned around the night before. We still hadn't reached the farm. We kept travelling until we found the gate another five minutes further along the road from where we had turned around.

At last. We had found "where the hell it was!"