Yesterday we took a trip down memories lane...... We arrived in Bundaberg Tuesday night, and left again the next morning.....
We decided before we left that we would go check out the Monkey Park ( as it was known when we were kids.) Unfortunately there are no monkeys left anymore.... and the zoo barely exists now. All it houses are a few birds and lots of lizards. Still we spent a very pleasant morning wandering around this park.
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| Alexandra Park - Bundaberg |
Just a glimpse of all that's left in the zoo part of the park now.
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| Some of the Bird Life |
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| Some of the Lizards |
Back when I lived in Bundy, the zoo housed the oldest tortoise in Australia, monkeys, Kangaroos, emus, lung fish, deer,birds, just to name a few.... so sad to see them all gone.
One of the other things I remember doing at Alexandra Park when I was young, was playing and hiding in this bamboo and climbing all over these guns. It is nice to see they still remain, and it was nice to walk around them and remember the happy times.
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| Rotunda and the big guns. |
As a teenager, we would often get together after church on a Sunday night and come sing in this rotunda, ah the memories..... we need to spend more time checking out familiar territory when we come home.
The park is certainly looking good with lovely children's play areas and beautifully manicured gardens. I did however miss the garden beds of lovely flowering spring flowers that the park was always known for when I was growing up.
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| Lovely manicured gardens and boardwalks. |
How the river bank has changed, these boardwalks are new, but the bridges aren't, It makes for some lovely walks, and it is so peaceful and relaxing to sit and watch the water, and the lovely boats that have made their home here.
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| Plenty of boardwalks out over the river. |
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| Great views of the bridges. |
In all we spent a lovely morning here. So glad we spent the time to come pay a visit.
Because of all the road works on the main highway we decided to take the back road to Childers through Goodwood. Unfortunately, we didn't miss the road works.
We were held up by these guys.
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| Even on the back road there were delays by roadworks. |
We also decided to take a little detour and drive the extra 19kms into Woodgate. Now it would be close to 30 years since I have been to Woodgate... It is still very much a sleepy little fishing town, although has grown somewhat since since I was last there, There are some beautiful homes along the esplanade these days. The one thing I noticed missing though was the swimming enclosure.... It is gone...
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| Beachfront at Woodgate. Beautiful coastline. |
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| A look at Theolodite Creek. |
Steve noticed a sandbank out from the coastline whilst we were admiring the beach at Woodgate, so of course we had to go find the creak that was obviously causing this sandbank to form, and we drove out to a pretty popular point and came across Theolodite Creek. There were quite a few people there enjoying the beautiful weather.
From Woodgate we headed back towards Childers, when the Navi decided to take us on a different route to the highway. Well it obviously did not know where it was going because we ended up on a dirt roads, through creeks ( good thing we were in a 4WD, and when it wanted us to go down a road that had a "NO THROUGH SIGN" on it. So we had to backtrack and go back to the main road and find our own way back out onto the highway.
There was many more waits as we had to stop for quite a few lots of roadworks. We had a slow but pleasant trip to the Sunshine Coast.
We did stop at this amazing place just outside of Gympie for a late lunch. The nicest hamburgers I have tasted in a long time. Home made meat patties on them rather than processed ones. So YUM,
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| Amazing hamburgers - great place for a break |
We arrived on the coast around 5pm, but it was a lovely day and we actually enjoyed the time chatting together and exploring some of our old haunts.
Dad was pleased to see us.... we had an overnight stop here and sometime today we will head off to Brissie. Hopefully we might do a little more touristy sightseeing along this last little leg of our journey.
