Day 184 / 2015 - Cairns Settling In

We have finally arrived at Cairns Coconut Tourist Park our temporary home for the next 4 weeks. We have only been here 5 minutes and we are talking about extending already.

Cairns Coconut Tourist Park is located just off the Bruce Hwy. The roads have been changed though and it is not a simple turn right off the Bruce anymore but you need to continue on to the Woree exit and back track a little still pretty easy to do though.

The park is fantastic it is designed with kids in mind but there are still lots of facilities for Adults as well. The park has won a number of awards and when you arrive you can see why from the smooth friendly check in to the clean amenities and well kept sites it is a credit to the owners. We were assigned a site in one of the loop roads which is good as you don't get as much through traffic. The site had a nice big concrete slab which made the boss happy and each site was reasonbly spaced apart with trees in between to give you a feeling of privacy. The facilities include 3 spas, 2 pools a Gym, Kids Water Park, Kids Playground, Putt Putt Golf, Water Aerobics, Outdoor Cinema and a free bus service to the centre of town. The highlight for us was free pancakes every Thursday morning. Every second day there is a fire truck which takes the kids for rides around the streets of the park.

The centre of town is about 8km away. You can either catch the bus provided by the park, use public transport or you can drive yourself in. most of the parking costs but there are certain areas you can park where the first 3 hours are free. There are plenty of shops to look through with ones down along The Eslanade mainly dedicated to tourists of different nationalities. Cairns caters for a large tourist population from Asia with direct flights from Japan and China. You can walk the entire length of the foreshore with a number of cafes dotted along the way. There is also a large swimming lagoon in town next to the foreshore with a number of BBQ and Pinic areas around it. Helicopter senic flights took off regularly from the foreshore offering passengers a birds eye view of the city and surrounding area.

Only 2 days here and of course who should get sick but yours truly. The old skin infection decided to flare up again landing me in hospital. I think we are getting use to detecting the symptons now before they get too advanced because we were so quick in getting in I only had a 24 hour stint in Hospital instead of 5 days unfortunately I was still off my feet for about a week.

Mic, Carley and Blake also stayed at the park. They were travelling through from Mission Beach to Cape Your and spent several days here looking around Cairns and preparing for the epic trek to the Tip of Cape York via The Bloomfield and Telegraph tracks. Oma wasted no time in showing Blake all the play areas of the park. She also wanted to take him on the firetruck but he wasn't to keen to get on.

Graham and Rhonda organised tickets into the Bulldogs Versus Gold Coast football game being played in Cairns. We ended up sitting with the Cheer squad at behind the Northern Goal Posts we had such a great view. The only downside is you had to dodge the incoming footy when goals were kicked. This wasn't so bad during the game but durring warmup they kicked about 30 footballs all at once Anne ended up spraining her wrist try to deflect a footy. The game was great and it was good to see the Western Bulldogs win the game. At 3/4 time we though Gold Coast had it in the bag but the Bulldogs fought back in the last quarter.

While we were in Cairns we became members of Cazaleys located at the football grounds. This entitled us to discount meals. We would regularly go on a Wednesday at lunchtime and take advantage of the members 3 course meal for $10.00 each. We ate so much the evening meal that night was generally just a few pieces of fruit. 

The Caravan park would on occasions put on free entertainment. sometimes it would be a singer or Musician but on every scond monday came the Barvarian Dance Troup. They were a local amature group who would give demonstrations of Barvarian dancing sometimes including the audience. Anne not being shy was up there and joining in at every opportunity.