Gold Coast – September 2013

Day 1 (part 2) – relaxing on the Goal Coast

Saturday 14nd September

So, Sandy and the kids eventually came back and we pottered around for a bit before heading out to explore the Gold Coast. When I spoke to the woman at reception at check-in earlier, she was telling me that there were loads of eating options in town (but didn’t go into any specific detail) so we thought we’d head down there to explore and finish up with a nice meal. I popped ‘briefly’ into reception again on the way out and this time spoke to a couple of different ladies that were managing the front desk. When I asked this time about where we could go to get a meal, they kind of looked at each other with a sense of general bemusement and between them really struggled to come up with anything more substantial than the food court of the local shopping centre. Right! To make matters worse, Sandy saw fit to bring but a single pair of shoes for Joey and it transpires that they are tattered and torn and giving him grief, and so we need to buy some new ones for him. No problem, Sandy and I thought, as we’ll just pop into the local 24×7 K-Mart of whatever to pick up some. And so I asked where the nearest 24×7 K-Mart was. 24×7? Here? In Queensland? Are you serious? Those were four back-to-back questions that both ladies hit me with in quick, succession when I mentioned this – all the while with a slight grin on their faces. Evidently, the world just shuts down here in Queensland after around 5.00pm daily – even on a Saturday. We had but a half an hour to get to the Gold Coast shopping centre (Australia Fair) and to find a new pair of shoes for Joey before everything shuts down. Tomorrow is a Sunday and I gather we’ll have even less luck than today.

Ok, so we high tailed it the 5-10 minutes in the car over to the Gold Coast foreshore and managed – just – to find the K-Mart, find some shoes (eventually!) and get out of there just before 5.30pm. From there, we wandered across the road to the foreshore and spent half an hour or so letting the kids burn off a bit of energy in the playground. Even though there was some sort of a concert in the park, I have to say that the place here is sort of dead for a Saturday evening with very few people out and about.

We did manage to find the odd restaurant dotted about the place but given that we were all a bit tired from the day’s travelling, we decided to head back to the cabin and just make do with some toast, sandwiches, cereals, etc., from the provisions that we picked up earlier in the day at the local supermarket. Kids are starting to wind down now and, with any luck, they’ll be heading off to bed sometime soon.

Somewhat uncharacteristic for us, we’re actually not entirely sure what we’re going to be doing tomorrow. The theme park tickets that we have just about gives us unrestricted access to all the theme parks here for the entire duration of our stay. Having said that, we actually don’t really know anything about the theme parks, what to expect from them or which ones we want to see. We did see Seaworld across the inter-coastal from the foreshore playground earlier this evening and we could make out two or three roller-coasters in the distance. Other than that, we’ll just play it by ear this time around and allow ourselves to be guided by the weather. The weather, incidentally is a balmy 27 degrees Celsius but it has been mostly overcast today and the locals think it’s ‘bad weather’. Tomorrow promises to be a similar temperature but with more sunshine so it’ll probably be a good ‘theme park day’ candidate.