mutteringhousewife

Not a Jamboree, that’s those twelve thousand Scouts converging on Queensland today and tomorrow. Jamberoo, where you control the action, the water park down the South Coast. That’s where we took the kids today.

I’ll pass lightly over the cheap shots, the astonishing variety of tummies and all those tattoos on display. All I’ll say is that if you’ve got a tattoo that’s over twenty years old, it’s going to be a blur unless it’s a very strong pattern. Also, if you’re going to tattoo the names of your children onto your skin, don’t put a border around them because if you then have another, you’ll have to have some laser work done and the next tattooist may not use the same font as the previous one. That’s all.

It’s a terrific family day out, there’s lots to do for little kids, for medium sized kids, and not so much for teenagers, which means there’s not that slightly antisocial horseplay you get with a lot of teenagers around. The grounds are lovely, with lots of shade and a large swathe of grass for you to spread your towels out on and park your esky at. I would highly recommend packing an esky (one with wheels), so you can avoid that deep fried stuff with yellow powder sprinkled on it that these places of amusement seem to specialise in. We brought a whole lot of water (the water out of the taps isn’t potable), cheese and vegemite rolls made last night (I’m sure I’ve blogged about these, anyway, the white bread recipe from Friday, roll it out after the first rise, spread it with Vegemite or cheese, slice it and roll it, rise again, bake), cut up watermelon, nuts and biscuits (Anzacs and ginger nuts). That pretty much did us.

There’s a variety of things to do. There’s a wave pool, a very wet kids playground with buckets of water tipping over them, water guns, and lots of little slides, one of those river circuits with inflatable rings, some big slides. The Taipan was probably my favourite, you and four of your personal friends or offspring load into an inflatable round raft and get shoved down a very twisty covered slide. The Funnelweb is their latest attraction, you’re loaded into a raft, pushed down a covered slide with no light and ejected into a huge funnel, where you twist and slip down to the vortex and get spat out. The kids loved this one, but said landing in the funnel hurt their buttocks, they may want to tweak that aspect of the ride. I didn’t go on it because I already have enough excitement in my life. The Moose said it made him feel a little ill.

They also really loved Jump Off the Rock. There’s a cliff over a five metre deep pool and you have three choices, the five metre jump, the three metre jump, and a slide for the slightly more risk averse among the crowd. I enjoyed watching this very much, the kids like to have someone to say “yes, I did see you do a triple corkscrew, you’re so clever”. Even the Horror managed the five metre jump, he appears to have conquered his fear of heights. The key to this jump is to take it at a run. Almost everyone who tiptoed to the edge to peer over chickened out. Something the lifeguards have evidently noted is that if you have a person of foreign appearance wearing street clothes instead of swimmers taking the slide, they will need rescuing. I saw it twice. I wonder what exactly they were thinking? That water I’ll be landing in after a five metre descent will be shallow enough for me to stand up in? Possibly. Both guys that did this looked very surprised in that brief moment between surfacing and thrashing their arms around then sinking like a stone. Both times the lifeguard was in the water as they landed.

You can have a full and action packed day if your kids are between, say, eight and fifteen. If your kids are younger, you may want to come with another family with similar sized sprogs so you can share the guarding of the various kiddie pools. If your kids are older, you may wish to leave them at home, or rope them into supervising the younger ones. Either way, it is fun to go with other families, everyone keeps dividing into different groups and meeting up throughout the day all over the place. During the afternoon the road surfaces get extremely hot, I just told the kids to harden up so I expect that over the next week the entire soles of our feet will be peeling off. It was too complicated to leave your thongs at the top, then fight back through the queue to retrieve them. Might be worth it for littlies though. Take your long sleeved rashies, this is not the kind of place you go to show off your breast enlargements or your months of hard work at the gym.

Here’s the Moose drying off. We’re all going to need a rest day tomorrow, especially judging by the appalling headache inducing dreck “music” thumping through our neighbour’s fence at this early hour. Hope you have a Happy New Year.