Barossa Mystery Picnic Through Angaston, South Australia

Coffee at the 40's Café in Angaston, South Australia.

On the final day of our three day getaway to the Barossa my partner, Enigma, had booked a Barossa Mystery Picnic, which sounded like a fun way to spend mid-morning through to a mid afternoon picnic lunch at a yet unknown destination.

Note that a Mystery Picnic is just one experience you can purchase from Amazing Co who are not limited to experiences in Adelaide. Their website is filled with experiences through many countries, cities, and regions - even 'at home experiences', so it's worth browsing their website to see if they have anything near you or your next holiday destination.

For our mystery picnic we were given a series of clues, each revealed after solving the previous clue. Each clue leads to your next destination. Most destinations are a local business where you can pick up various items of food that will make up your picnic lunch at the final destination. The cost of the mystery picnic gives you a set budget to spend at each location. You can buy more but if you go over budget then you pay the additional cost at the checkout.

Bronze Sculpture:: 'Day Off, Peter'
by Christopher John Radford.
(The original fiberglass sculpture can be
seen in my 2009 post here.)

I won't detail our particular clue trail suffice to say that we did have at least one stop in the town of Angaston. If you know the town you could probably take a really good, educated guess at what local business it was, and be correct. I've written about my visits to Angaston before including attending their excellent Town Day, as part of the Barossa Festival, back in 2009.

Incidentally if you are planning a trip to Angaston, for some reason many businesses are closed on a Monday. Though fortunately not the 40's Café, which we had come to Angaston on the Monday specifically to visit for lunch. We had a really delicious half and half pizza.

That aside, Angaston is a very photogenic town so I took the opportunity to snap a few photos of things that caught my eye.

Getting back to the Mystery Picnic, Enigma and I did have fun solving the various clues. Some were quite challenging. If you do get completely stuck, you can get hints or reveal the answers. I think we only had one or two clues that we really had to sit down and think about, but we did solve all of them ourselves.

There was one location we would've liked to have skipped because we knew there was no chance of picking up any food there, and it was a location we've been to a few times before (and I've even written about in this blog). However we couldn't avoid not going there to solve our next clue.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice location if you've never seen or been to it before. If you have, you'll definitely have an opinion about whether it's worth seeing again.

Aside from that, I would recommend a Mystery Picnic. Following the clues made the drive between locations a bit more of an adventure. We actually enjoyed our first ever wine tasting during the journey (we're not really into wine enough to just visit wineries for tastings) and the eventual haul of food was more than we could eat in a single picnic. We had plenty to take home.

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