Day 80: Wet 'n Wild Grants

While our friends in Tasmania are freezing their butts off, we have spent the day clad in not much more than bathers, slopping on sunscreen, swooping down slides and lolling on tubes in water. Yahoo! What fun!

After our warm-up at Movie World yesterday, we felt brave enough to try some of the Extreme H2O rides. Andrew just took it as a given that he would do these, but we needed a bit of convincing. Anyhoo, the first thing we did was the Tornado. What a thrill! It was such fun and really scream-worthy. A lot of stress was released in this (screaming) fashion today. Fantastic. I think we need to have one in our garden.

Up the wall...

And out the spout!

For those of you who don't know what the Tornado is, it basically consists of a short (but steep) enclosed tube ride on an inflatable, which then whooshes out into a big cone. You then shoot up and down the sides of the cone, working from the bigger end down to the smaller end, where you shoot out at the bottom into a pool. As I said, very scream-worthy. We did that one a number of times.

We also tried the Mach 5 slide while the adrenalin was flowing and the thinking through of the details was not high on the agenda. OMG! I had to psyche myself up to get up all the stairs to the top of the tower first...then you sit at the top of the slide which has a gate in front of it - that in itself should be a warning! Then, ankles crossed, hands behind head, elbows in and you're off. It was quite a slide - so fast that it takes about 10 metres of water trough at the bottom before you to stop (at this point your nasal passages get thoroughly washed out) and you can feel the burn on your shoulder blades. Pheeeee-ew!

The Aqua Racer was really very tame and dull after this. The Wave Pool was fun - a bit of a workout on the thighs with all that jumping up and down, while the Calypso Beach river (floating around on tubes) was very relaxing and delightful.

Andrew desperately wanted to do the Black Hole ride, but the rest of us were too chicken to join him. As it is a long black (so you can't see anything) tunnel that whips left and right and dips periodically, it was not our cup of tea. Callum and I did one of those in Malaysia and both felt like vomitting at the end. This one is longer. And starts very high up. Anyway, I did manage to find someone else to go with him: necessary because you have to ride the inflatable in pairs. He loved it of course.

All in all it was a good day (how could it not be?) and we are once again pooped and flopped in front of the TV, doing blogs.

Today marks the turn-around-point in our trip. We are not going to proceed any further north from here. We are heading back to Tamworth tomorrow. We might have to linger there into next week as we wait for the ute to be sorted out. It will be a good opportunity to catch up on some school work, as we haven't done any for a while (no room in the hire car for school books).

Fingers crossed that the ute will be ready sooner rather than later...