Monday, October 12, 2009

Camping in the Outback

This was one of the last opportunities we'd have to go
camping for the weekend as the weather will soon be
too hot. Even as it was, temperatures ranged from 9 to 34
Celsius (or 48 to 95Fahrenheit). It was COOOoooold
at night (especially compared to our afternoon)!

In the first picture you can see our campsite across on the
other side of the dry river bed. (Click on the picture to
enlarge it.)

One little activity we did was to go on a nature walk. The
kids collected small items to put on photo paper. I took a
couple pictures of the pretty little flowers. One had
sharp needles on it. Ouch!






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Our kids have always been terrific about wearing hats --
and even though the flies really weren't bad this weekend
they still insisted on wearing their fly nets. Often the flies
are horrible with upwards of 50-100 flies landing on your
back (face and so forth!)

We also did an orienteering game.  We showed them how to
use a compass and had them find the treasure by going north
to a big tree, east to another big tree and traveling south til they
found the treasure (you get the idea).  They loved this and we
did this a number of times.

Other than that we just had good-old fashioned family
fun -- campfires, stories, marshmellows, walks and climbing
the dead trees, and dirt lots of dirt!

Oh -- one last thing about ants.  Australia has more ants than
anywhere else in the world. There are lines of ants that
stream for long, long distances.  Anyway, one type is an
inch long aggressive ant called the bull ant (also known as
the bull dog ant).  Poor DD got bit not once, not twice
but FOUR separate times on this camping trip.  Visit this
website to see pictures of this scary looking ant!  One
website mentions "Bullants stings hurt so much
because they inject formic acid into the sting! They use
their large jaws to grab hold of you and then use their
stinger to inject the formic acid."

1 comment:

  1. Hi, it's a very great blog.
    I could tell how much efforts you've taken on it.
    Keep doing!

    ReplyDelete