True to yesterday's promise, we agreed that there was no long boring drives checking out this magnificent state of ours, and instead we would go for a nice relaxing walk up to the Main Street. Tracy had seen a short walk on the park map that led us around the back of town to the playground so we headed off in that direction.
In less than 10 minutes, we had reached the sign indicating we were at the start of the walk. Not the concrete path that we were expecting, but a gravel, ant infested trail through the native scrub typically found in the Flinders Ranges.
The sign said it was only 600m with an optional 800m detour in the middle so reluctantly, I relented and agreed to go after the kids and Tracy who had already disappeared into the bush. It may be worth noting that Dylan had ridden his scooter on this walk and I had my best hiking footwear on. The scooter was now slung over my shoulder and my footwear was just a case of "suck it up Princess".
We did the detour and it turned out ok, except for the 10 billion ants that kept trying to climb up my feet and ankles and bite every millimetre of my leg. We got to a dirt fire track road, with a sign on the other side indicating stage 2 of the trail continuing. Despite this not showing clearly on the map, Tracy was in control of the map and apparently worked out where we were and convinced us all that this was the same length track as we had just hiked and would pop us out at the playground.
Well...... 45 minutes later with no more water in any of our bottles and enough sweat pouring out of my head to add another inch into Lake Albert, we were still bush walking... in my thongs with a scooter wrapped around my neck!
It was at this stage I took the map off Tracy and advised that she was never to look at a map again.
Thinking I would resort to my ever faithful Google Maps, I whipped out my phone to see just how lost we really were, only to find the stupid thing was locked up and wouldn't go off the home screen.
We kept trudging along for what seems to be another 30 minutes encountering a couple of friendly blue tongue lizards and all of a sudden heard some cars nearby.
The kids actually started running at this stage in excitement (and not having a scooter on their back or a pair of ant infested thongs to slow them down), and reached the road.
My excitement wasn't quite as clear... we were on a section of road where the speed limit was quite clearly 100 km/hr which immediately said to me that we were not really that close to town centre. And to top it off, every inch of the side of the road was covered in bull ants, meaning the kids needed to either be mowed down by the next passing car or eaten alive by an army of ants.
Using my impressive directional skills, I went left and started walking towards what I hoped was town, with the kids being reminded every minute that the next car to come over the hill behind them was likely to flatten them all to the size of the ants we were desperately trying to avoid.
Then the weirdest thing happened. The first car to come over the hill slowed down and reversed back to us, with the driver sticking her head out of the window saying "Hello Weyland's". Turns out to be a mum from Soccer and her kids heading into Meningie from their farm property that we were potentially going to reach if we had kept on the trail earlier.
We very gratefully accepted a lift and got driven in luxury to the playground where I collapsed on the beautiful green grass whilst the kids played on the equipment and Tracy chatted.
After recuperating with an ice block and some much needed rest, we ambled back, passing the local Australia Day thong tree.
After lunch we spent the afternoon sitting on the edge of the lake whilst the kids played in the shallows with some new friends they had made. Tyler took Taz in at one stage and let him go, but I am not convinced that the poor dog liked it at all, judging by the speed he swam back to shore and ran around like a rabid wild animal chasing its next meal.
Before we knew it, the day had ended and we were cooking tea on the Weber for the last time as this is our last night of this holiday.
We should be home by lunch time tomorrow, which gives us plenty of time to get the house into some sort of order after 3 weeks of absence.