Australia Part II: Wildlife and Beach

(I wrote this 3 days ago but now I finally have a fast enough internet connection to get this post finished and posted. I'm appreciating the internet speed I usually take for granted at home! Since this post, we've spent 2 perfect days exploring Sydney, did a radio show and a top TV morning show here - pretty exciting - and did the first day of our Sydney Retreat - going beautifully so far - one more day to be with this fabulous "mums" and we head home Sunday morning. Will be so sad to leave so many dear new friends and such a beautiful, fun, exciting country we've grown to love. But will be SO good to see Jared and the rest of the kids again - missing them so much!)

What a perfect day!

We got up early and headed to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on the southern end of the Gold Coast. We spent the day petting and feeding kangaroos plus seeing great reptile and bird shows and seeing koalas and wombats and all sorts of crazy and cool creatures. We also did this really fun and challenging ropes course through the jungle of the sanctuary.

After a great day at the Sanctuary, we had dinner at this amazing place right on Currumbin Beach - the Currumbin Surf Club. Then after our early dinner, we had a great time swimming (Ashton) and wading (me) on probably the prettiest beach I've ever seen until the sun went down. Warm water, gorgeous white sand, the prettiest colors in the water, tide pools, perfect weather. Happy happy happy.

I'll let photos fill in the details.

Of course Ashton was the first to volunteer to hold the snakes in the reptile show (Did you know 1 in three houses on the Gold Coast has snakes in it? And Australia has 10 of the top 10 species of deadly venemous snakes? But luckily most house snakes are innocent and do a great job eating any rodents around.)  

Ashton had to climb every tree he could find. See him up there? This tree was a favorite.

Koalas really are terribly cute. Fun to be about 3 feet away from them.

These guys were wandering all over the place - they are about 3 feet long!

 Those are koalas in the trees behind us.

We went into this enclosure where there were like 200 kangaroos and we could feed and pet them - pretty cool!

 

Ashton and this Emu became best friends.

 

As well as awesome wildlife and beautiful grounds, Currumbin Sanctuary had this quite amazing ropes course. We put on snazzy jump suits and had a very challenging and fun and exciting time tight-rope walking and zip-lining through the jungle. I did the easy and intermediate courses with Ashton and bravely ziplined and climbed all over the place. But I was a bit shakey and tired after that so I opted out of the "extremely challenging" level course and watched Ashton do it. He's brave. And strong. I was impressed.

 

This is Ashton WAY up there. I was zoomed way in for this photo.

After plenty of good times at the wildlife park, we headed to the beach that was just a few steps down the road. We started off by climbing a big rock where we could get sweeping views up and down the coast.

 

Beach at Currumbin - amazing views both directions,
gorgeous baby-powder sand, clean green water

View down the Gold Coast towards the big buildings of Surfer's Paradise

delicious dinner with amazing views at the Currumbin Surf Club 

 We played in the waves as the sun set - pretty darn beautiful stuff.