Melbourne has lots of flies. The tourist books intelligently leave this detail out. There are tons of them and they are not your typical Canadian flies that are so dumb you can kill them with a single swat. No. These flies are sticky, persistent, human loving, Superflies. They are everywhere. There are usually 3-4 buzzing around any of our light fixtures at any given time (one downfall of having the doors open so kids can come and go as they please). They probably love our garage too since we can accumulate quite the load of diapers in our rubbish can! You can swat all you like but they will remain attached to you until they have had their fill. At first the kids would scream bloody murder whenever a fly landed on them. 
Now they will point and laugh at flies, all the while chanting “Bug Fly! Bug Fly! Go Way Bug Fly!” for a better portion of the day.
Forgetting this whole fly issue, we decided a trip to the Collingwood Children’s Farm was in order. Not sure what we were thinking…hot day, farm full of animals and manure…would you expect sticky flies???? The kids coped better than I did but it was not the dream daytrip we were hoping for.
The Farm is pretty centrally located – sort of like the Experimental Farm in Ottawa. It is just off of the bike-path Jeff has travelled a number of times so he was interested to see what it was all about. The animals were penned and you were able to get up close to the goats and sheep, hold some guinea pigs, see some barn cats, chickens roaming free, and the odd pig and cow. A tractor ride around some fields was well received, pony rides were available but the lines were pretty long and our kids weren’t too keen. True to Melbourne fashion however, there was a café on site with a pretty good menu. We had packed our own lunch, expecting the farm to entertain our kids for a bit longer than it did, but we ended up heading home for lunch to escape the flies. I imagine this would be a wonderful place for older kids in cooler weather, before the flies take over!!!
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