It was meant to be an interesting, informative and inspiring Easter weekend day out with the children, but it turned into a hair-raising experience with a little too much drama for comfort.
A mother and her son and daughter narrowly avoided disaster when their car burst into flames in the middle of the lion enclosure of Longleat safari park.
"It could have been in the flamingos or the camels but no, it had to be in the lion enclosure," Helen Clements told the BBC.
Clements was visiting Longleat, in Wilstshire, with her 12-year-old daughter, Charlie, and nine-year-old son, George, on Good Friday. While in the enclosure they noticed fumes coming from their car and assumed it had overheated.
Pictures taken by other visitors of the park show that the "steam" they thought they saw quickly developed into thick smoke, and then flames started flickering out of the vehicle's bonnet.
"Then basically, we thought 'that's not steam, that's actually smoke'," she told BBC News. "And it was getting thicker and thicker and obviously coming into us, and then obviously we saw flames."
Visitors to Longleat have to stay in their cars for their own safety, while the zoo animals can roam freely in enclosures. Clements beeped her horn – an action that staff, who know the danger that a pride of lions can hold, later praised.
When Clements and her son – understandably alarmed at the smoke – opened the car doors, park rangers ran towards them yelling: "Get back in the car. Do not get out of the car."
"What do you do?" said Clements, from Kingswood, Gloucestershire. "Do you get out of the car because you're on fire? They're telling you to get back in the car."
George initially ran out of the car but was called back by his mother. Moments later a park ranger pulled up in another car and took the family to safety away from the lions who, according to staff at the park, "weren't that interested in what was going on anyway".
Clements said: "The rangers were fantastic. They came straight away. As [the ranger] opened the door we just jumped into his vehicle, and they took us away and got it all sorted out."
A spokesperson for the safari park said: "A female and two children were quickly picked up by the rangers who transferred them into their vehicle, and the fire service was called. The car subsequently caught fire after the guests had been escorted [away]. The lions were cleared from the enclosure and the safari park closed. There were two vehicles. One pulled up alongside the car and transferred the people while the other car made sure the lions were kept back – but they weren't very interested in what was going on anyway. Then they were put in their house."
Clements said the lions, some of the 500 animals that roam across Longleat's 9,000 acres, were about 100 metres away from her car. They were not visible to her and the children because of other cars blocking the view.
"I can laugh about it now – it's only a car and we're all safe," said Clements. "You look at the funny side of it now."
Longleat, which was the subject of BBC's Animal Park series, hosted by Kate Humble and Ben Fogle, opened in and was the first safari park of its kind anywhere in the world. It also keeps, among other animals, four Amur tigers, six cheetahs, deer, and Asian elephants.
