A Week at Mildura!

We finally got away for a week and headed off to Mildura on the Murray River. The kids spent hours on the jumping pillow. They made lots of new friends which was great.One evening a hot air balloon lifted off from further over in the caravan park and flew over the top of us. It was a lot closer than it looks in the photo.We went to Orange World where we went around an orange orchard. The perfume from the orange blossom was beautiful. The oranges were so sweet and juicy too!Another day we went to Wentworth. It is a very old town. Here we are at the Wentworth Gaol. The boys (large and small) had fun dressing up!This is where the Murray River meets the Darling River at Wentworth. To the left is the Darling River and the right is the Murray.We sat down to have a picnic lunch when these four ducks waddled over to see what we had. When we'd finished eating, they then headed over to the other side of the park to see what was going there!We also went to some sand hills nearby. Mitchell and Austin had fun "planking"!Wednesday we headed out to Mungo National Park. It was 110km from Mildura, 88 of them on dirt road!Thousands of years ago, this was a lake! This is what they call "The Walls of China". Over time the sand has blown and made these formations.This is the old sheep shed. It was built around 1859!When we left Mungo and had gone about 40kms, a mighty storm came in. It went pitch black, strong winds, thunder, lightening, rain and hail. We had to pull over as you couldn't see anything. There were branches blowing over the road. Luckily we were able to get out. This road is closed when there is rain and in just that short time, the road was flooded on either side. Sometimes we even had to drive through the water. If we had been heading to Mungo, we would have been stuck there until they opened the rain again (and who knows when that would have been).

We were wondering how our campsite would look when we got back to Mildura but only a small shower had gone through (although it was a bit windy).On the last day we went on a paddle steamer ride. Not this one, we forgot to take a photo of the one we went on! Paddle steamers are a lovely way to travel.