Exploring the Gold Coast Theme Parks

People travel to the Gold Coast for a number of reasons… they come for the weather, the beaches, night life and of course theme parks. And of course that’s something that we just couldn’t do during this trip!

The main theme parks in the area are Movie World, Sea World and Wet’n Wild and generally the best option is to buy a multi pass to enjoy all of them. Now we initially thought of getting a 3-day pass to enjoy them however later on decided to spend a bit extra and get the 7-day pass, and let me tell you, that’s a much better option!

As we only had around a week on the Gold Coast, we initially were thinking of doing the theme parks during the first three days, however decided against it as we realised that there is such a thing as too much fun (and too much effort). As such the 7-day pass gave us a bit more freedom. We did however start our first morning on the Gold Coast with a visit to Movie World.

Now, we knew that it was going to be busy due to school holidays however what we didn’t realise is that since we can’t leave Australia (or at least not unless you have a very good reason and then won’t be able to return) a lot and a lot of people had the same idea as we did. So we showed up to the theme park and there was already a MASSIVE line-up waiting for the park to open.

We did eventually get inside and walked around, rode a ride or two, watched the car show and then just tried to book entry for other rides (through the app). All in all we managed to do the rides that we were keen on and that the kids would be willing to do, which was a good thing as the more popular rides had an average waiting time of 2-3 hours, crazy!

One theme park down and we decided to tackle another the following day, this time we visitedSea World. Having learnt our lesson, we arrived a bit earlier that morning, managed to avoid the worst of the line-ups and entered the park whilst it was still fairly empty.

We managed to see Jelly Fish, Penguins, Dolphins and even got on one of the rides without having to line up and wait. At Castaway Bay Suz, Xander, Eloise and Therese got in the Pirate ship whilst I decided to handle the water cannons… and let’s just say, there were some very wet people at the end of this ride 😉

The rest of the day we spent seeing a Dolphin show, seeing more penguins, the kids got to get close and touch certain sea water animals and ride a few more rides. All in all, we had a great day and even though it got busier during the day, it was nowhere as busy as Movie World.

After two full days at the theme parks we needed a few days to catch up (and also we were holding on until the hottest day of the week) but we eventually got toWet’n Wild. We again got here fairly early and managed to get inside and onto a ride early on. After the first ride however, you could count on at least 45min – 1 hour wait for each and every ride (and more for the really popular ones).

We did get quite a few rides in and then later on towards the afternoon, Suz and I sat and let Xander and Eloise just play on the smaller waterparks and playgrounds as we weren’t too keen on more lines.

All in all we had a great few days at the Theme Parks and would visit them again (during a less busy period however). All the parks were fun to visit but my favourite was Sea World due to the variety of rides and sea life on show.