YOU CALL THIS A WATERPARK!

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We woke up bright and early as we were excited about going to the water park. They market themselves as the biggest and best in Auz so even though the kids were still of school we couldn’t miss it. We had a quick breakfast and left early so that we could be first in line. When we arrive it looked like a lot of people had the same idea as us - the queue was massive. They let people in early and the queue soon died down. We threw our stuff into the locker and went in search of the first slide of the day. On our way round we noticed that many of the rides slides we closed for maintenance. The rides that were open were the tame slides and because around a third of the place was closed it made the queues for them really long. We queued up for the best ones and then went for a float along the lazy river - this had so many people in that we were constantly getting stuck in a bottleneck, not a relaxing experience. At 2pm we gave up. We had been looking forward to this day for ages so were very sad that it had not been what we expected. Wet and Wild turned out to be more like damp and tame.

We drove south and through the Gold Coast with its famous places like Surfers Paradise. They were good to see but we didn’t have much time left and there were still other of places we wanted to see more . These were not the places we were looking forward to the most. There were lovely beaches but they were spoilt because of the many high rise buildings and tacky shops. We stopped and walked along some of the beaches and took some pictures but didn’t stay long. For some people this is their idea of heaven. I suppose this is the reason that it is such a popular tourist destination, but not for us. We were looking forward to all the beautiful empty beaches and secluded coves that we knew we would come across further south so we were happy for it to be a fleeting visit.

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