The last three days

This is the last instalment of the holiday posts. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3 if you so desire.

After a busy day at Currumbin and a late night (11pm) seeing the glow worms we got ready to do our last theme park – Movie World. Arriving at Movie World the first thing you see is a scary looking Batman ride where you get sent up in the air very very quickly and come down and then go back up while gradually slowing down. The scariest bit is the first time you come down because you feel like you’re going to leave the seat and it feels a bit unsafe but we did it twice anyway. My tough son JJ informed me that he no longer felt that scary feeling in the tummy.

I wish we’d gone to do some other rides before it got busier. We missed out on the Scooby Doo scary ride and also the Superman roller coaster because of 45+ minute waits.

I did meet Scooby Doo and Shaggy though. JJ didn’t want his photo taken with them so he took this one.

We also managed to see the Hollywood Stunt Drivers show which was quite entertaining but a bit smelly from all that burnt rubber.

We squeezed in a Loony Tunes show – not that entertaining for me but the young kids liked it. Shrek 4D was pretty good and luckily we had the ponchos to wear for the Wild West ride.

Friday night was our last night at the Gold Coast and I went out to dinner with some people I’d met while our kids were in the kids club – yay for the kids club.

Saturday morning we packed up, checked out and walked down the road to the hire car place and drove south to Yamba in northern New South Wales where my aunt lives. She’d said it would take about two hours but by the time we fluffed around a bit and got stuck in the Ballina bypass roadworks it took more like three hours. The last time I drove on the Pacific Highway was 12 years ago on my road trip with three gay boys. I must write about that one day.

Unless I was a surfer which I’m not Yamba probably wouldn’t have been on my radar to visit normally but it’s a beautiful spot and the view from the pub over the ocean is spectacular.

Because we’d spent most of the day in the car I took JJ for a walk and happened upon some fishermen cleaning up fish and throwing what they didn’t want to these pelicans at the Yamba Bay boat ramp. I love pelicans and could just watch them for ages fighting over fish.

Even though I’m not a surfer we went to Angourie – near Yamba – and watched some people surfing.

After spending the weekend at my aunt’s we took our time heading back up to the Gold Coast to catch the plane back to Adelaide. We stopped in Byron Bay for lunch and the other two or three times I was there was obviously not during the school holidays as I’ve never seen the streets so busy.

As I’ve mentioned before, our holiday was really good. JJ and I travel well together and while I enjoyed the Gold Coast bit I also enjoyed the driving component and I would have liked to stop and explore more places for longer. Maybe we’ll hop in the Nissan one day and go driving interstate.