Tuesday 19/12
We wake up around 6pm, without alarm clock. Somehow normal since we fell asleep early yesterday evening…
The kids sleep a bit later, until 7am. We take a very light cereals breakfast.
Isabelle and I go to Woolworths to buy food for lunch (bread with ham, cheese, salami and tomatoes). The food is indeed always very expensive in this kind of theme parks.
We buy our tickets (80$ per person) at our motel. In fact the tickets are valid for both Dream World and WhiteWater World. We receive the map of the park, which enables us to prepare a tentative itinerary (I had done a quick search on internet to know which are the best attractions).
We arrive at the park at 9:45am, 15′ before the opening.
We (Ludivine, Jules and I) start with the most ‘thrill’ attractions, while Isabelle goes to the Corroboree section to see the native Australian animals and Florence stays with us but only watches us. It’s not very crowded: we wait less than 5′ at each attraction. Some of the rides (part of the ‘Big 9 Thrill Rides’) are quite impressive, such as the ‘Tower of Terror II’ or the (gut-churning) ‘Giant Drop’, which is the tallest freefalling ride in the world.
At noon, we go on ‘Tiger Island’, to see the tiger show, quite nice (and educative). We then go back to the car to eat our nice picnic, in the shade. We rapidly go back into the park, first to watch a short movie by the directors of ‘How to train your dragon’; we like it.
After that, we start the second part of the day: WhiteWater World. Although the queues are a bit longer than this morning, we once again are very efficient and manage to do all the attractions that we wanted, together. Kids enjoy! We leave the park at 5pm (closing time of the park); we’ve stayed 7 hours in the park.
We take the car for the 2-hour drive to Byron Bay. I like the name of the highway: ‘Sunshine Motorway’. The speed limitation is low: mostly 110 km/h but sometimes 100 km/h… But it’s nice to have a car and to listen to our playlists. We snack on a lot in the car. We see a sign indicating 850 km to Sidney, but this is for Christmas Day next week…
We arrive at 8pm in Byron Bay (we again lost one hour between Queensland State and New South Wales State). The Airbnb, a house located a bit more than 1 km from the centre, is gorgeous: 3 rooms (with a lot of storage place in the cupboards), 2 bathrooms (with nice towels), a great kitchen fully furnished (with all amenities, utensils and even Tupperware), 2 big tables (inside and outside), nice furniture, a great garden… Clearly the best Airbnb so far. We stay 6 nights here. Kids are happy. We’ve moved a lot since our arrival in Australia, already 10 days ago!
Isabelle and I go to Woolworths supermarket to buy groceries. Many people are shopping barefoot and/or shirtless.
We come back one hour later. I cook pasta.
Kids are in bed at 10pm. I write posts until midnight.
