Welcome to the Sunshine Coast :)

After sleeping in until 8, which was glorious, my host family took me up the coast for a little bit of sight seeing and shopping. Because shopping isn’t really preferred by the boys, we dropped them off at Aussie World for the day. Think of a county fair carnival. That’s about the quality of the rides. But they were so excited to sit on the bumper cars all day that it didn’t matter much to them. After saying goodbye, Karen and I headed up the coast to the Mapleton/Maleny area, which is basically central to the Sunshine Coast. I tried to stay as involved in the conversation in the car as much as I could, but I was so distracted by the beautiful hills and view of the entire coast. Once we reached the lookout, we were literally within reaching distance of the clouds. The entire coast was laid out before us. At that point I couldn’t decide what view was better, the land or the ocean from yesterday. When we were finished being in awe of the view, we drove about 20 km further to the shopping area. We grabbed a Coke for the walk, and started on our shopping journey.

I was planning on buying tons of unique stuff since my wallet was full of my recently withdrawn cash  Let’s just say… my lunch and gelato was the only purchase of the day. The shopping center has a lot of shops that would come in handy IF I had my own house. I mean “Christmas in July” and candle shops aren’t the kind of places I really had pictured shopping at. Regardless, we had fun walking around and window shopping. When I pictured shopping in Australia, I had imagined coming home with loads of new unique clothes that can only be found there. Sadly enough, EVERY item I had even considered buying was “made in china.” How lame. I found a few things that said “designed in Australia, made in Indonesia” which was a little better but I still didn’t feel like spending my money on stuff like that. Karen and I DEFINITELY made our trip to the Fudge shop worth it though. I have never in my life seen so many different varieties of fudge. “Kahlua”… “Chili Chocolate”… “Wasabi”… the list goes on and on!! I sampled about 5, including the chili chocolate. The chili doesn’t hit ya until the end! Karen ended up buying a few varieties while I was satisfied with just the samples  We ate lunch at (an overpriced) little shop and grabbed gelato for dessert! Since we had hit all the shops, we headed back to gather the boys up and, after given Ken’s armband, I was able to check out Aussie World a bit. Luke and Ben sat on those darned bumper cars for the entire time I was in there! I had hoped to beat them at mini-golf but no such luck.

written by

Sara Sickels on August 29, 2010 from Maleny, Australia

from the travel blog: Australia!!

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