01/06 | Mt Tamborine and the Thunderbird Adventure Parc
Debbie has just finished two months of med rotation at Nambour and is just about to start two months at Gladstone. The good news, however, is that they gave her a weeks holiday in-between and after flying to Sydney for a few days to visit her best friend Trish, she wanted to spend the next few days with me. Yay! It was such a great little holiday I wish I could say I played some role in contributing, but in reality Debbie planned everything and didn't even tell me where we were going until we arrived! All I had to do is sit back and relinquish my credit card...... no only kidding. :-P
On our little get-away we drove up to Mt Tamborine and stayed two nights at the Mountain Edge Lodges resort. I'd highly recommend the place too - our little cottage was basically one huge open room, with a spa and log-fire... plus everything else you could ask for, including a nice little breakfast hamper. It's been really cold lately, and so of course it was freezing up on Mt Tamborine, but the wood fire and heaters kept us at a nice temperature. On our first day-and-a-bit we did Debbie things (which I'm actually starting to enjoy, but don't tell her that) - we visited a couple of wineries (she LOVES wineries) and a fantastic little cheesery. I've been to Mt Tamborine before, but never properly, so I was pretty impressed with the number of things there are to do there - heaps of wineries, art galleries and little novelty stores around. But the really cool part (and one of the reasons she took me there) was the newest attraction at Thunderbird Park. Thunderbird Park itself has always had thunder egg fossicking, but about a year ago (May 2007) a group of French people built a fantastic high-ropes course there which they call Adventure Parc (you can blame the French for "c") and a bunch of other stuff. I found out about it through a German friend called Meike who showed me her photos. Anyway, I must have showed Debbie the same photos, because she remembered me saying I wanted to go there and in the end she enjoyed it ALMOST as much as me. I have some of my own photos below..... it's $41 for students, but they have four awesome courses (varying in difficulty) the whole thing takes about two hours-and-a-half hours, and it's definitely worth doing. The course includes several flying and is between five and seven meters off the ground and foxes, and yet you always feel fairly safe. I'm usually a bit scared of heights, but they have a great setup where you have two caribinas and a pulley, so you're always "connected" to at least one cable as you travel from one tree/platform to the next. So fun! The final course is the called the "sensations course" and there are no cables - just a net below you..... make sure you fall at least once on this course.
We also went to an artificial glow worm cave at Cedar Creek, which was fairly cool... I've been to glow worm caves before, but the good thing about this place is that they show a presentation explaining all the stuff about glow-worms I never knew. It was also nice just walking around the property - as well as the cave they also have their own artificial lake, artificial vineyard, and artificial winery. We actually chose a fairly bad week to travel - there was heaps of rain, but we were lucky enough that the rain started just as we were finishing the last ropes course, and most of the cold rain was while we were in the car or huddled in our little cottage. It was a really awesome holiday.... one day I'll have to write my a list of attractions around Brisbane the same as I've done for Cairns on my wiki site. Mt Tamborine would be right up there at the top! :-)
