Diary of a geek

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Andrew Pollock

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Thursday, 04 December 2014

Day 309: Seaworld

My friends Alec and Christine were holidaying on the Gold Coast with their daughter Eloise this week, and I'd made plans to rendezvous with them at Seaworld for the day.

Sarah dropped Zoe around in the morning, and we departed not long after, with a side visit to the post office to clear my post office box.

We arrived at Seaworld just after 10am, and Alec and Christine were already inside and had secured some seats for the Seal Detective show. They saved us some seats and we joined them.

After that, we tried to watch the dolphin show, but they had to cancel it because someone had managed to trip over a stroller that was past the stroller parking area and had injured themselves. It seemed like quite the incident management, with a lot of Seaworld people descending on the scene, and erecting screens around the injured person. I have no idea why they weren't able to quickly move them and proceed with the show.

We grabbed some lunch and had the obligatory ride on the Vikings Revenge Flume Ride (that thing is such a Seaworld institution). It was getting hot, and Eloise was a bit tired and cranky from a full week of vacationing, so we decided to go back to their hotel and have a swim in the pool.

Zoe wanted to take the bus back with them, so I drove back to the Marriott and availed myself of their free valet parking, and we had a swim. The Surfers' Paradise Marriott certainly has a very impressive swimming area. We had lots of fun.

We ended up staying for dinner before heading back. Zoe fell asleep in the car on the way back despite my best efforts to prevent it. She had quite a meltdown when I had to get her out of the car when we got home, so I had to basically get her into her pajamas and pour her into bed and she fell back asleep easily.

It was a really nice day out.

[19:55] [life] [permalink]

Day 308: Christmas shopping in the city

Zoe managed to slip and fall on her bottom trying to get out of bed at midnight last night. I resettled her back in her bed and she was up for the day at a delightful 5:45am.

I thought we could take the bus into the city and do some Christmas shopping.

After a lot of procrastinating, we finally got out of the house, and managed to walk straight onto a bus, which was pretty good timing.

Our first stop was Officeworks to get Zoe's Kindergarten transition statement (which I'd received the previous day and was absolutely fantastic) copied, and then we dropped into biome to attempt to look at PlanetBox (unsuccessfully, they were all out of stock).

Then we headed over to the Myer Centre, to check out the Santa offerings. I was on a quest to find a real bearded Santa, as all of Zoe's original Santa photos were with real bearded Santas (except for last year, which was a major disappointment). I got lucky, and the Myer store Santa had a real beard (or as it turned out, one of them did).

Myer runs a pretty tight ship with their Santa, and it turns out the reason they have him sequestered away in a tiny room, is they actually run two Santas in parallel, and having him out of sight helps to not ruin the illusion for the kids.

After the photo, Zoe went and had lunch with Sarah, and I did a spot more Christmas shopping and grabbed some lunch myself.

After Zoe was reunited with me, we made our way back to the bus and headed home.

After we got home, we just chilled out at home until Sarah picked Zoe up.

[02:55] [life] [permalink]