Time to head out of the Gold Coast now and we're headed north to Aussie World, a small little park a little over an hour north of Brisbane. It's home to what would be the fourth wooden wild mouse, and if we got this we'd have ridden all the known wooden mouse coasters in the world (4 of the 5 on this trip alone)
Well you're certainly not going to miss driving past this park! I love that the hound is making the sign of the horns!
But just in case there's the majestic Ettamoogah Pub complete with van on the roof. One of the Australian magazines ran a cartoon for years about this pub. I'm not sure if the cartoons pre-date the building but I suspect it's vice versa.
It's a great looking pub with lots of wooden fixtures inside, the source of which were the trees that were cut down to make way for the building. This pool table is great!
Looking equally impressive is the entrance to the theme park. When we got there the manager on the desk told us the following "Sorry, but the mouse coaster is closed and I thought I'd tell you before you bought the ticket". ARGH! That's not what we wanted to hear. We asked if we could go in and take photos of it and he gave us press passes at no cost to do that. A massive shame but very nice of the park to tell us up front rather than have us pay and find out later.
So we headed to the back of the park and took the photos of the coaster. It looked to be in good nick and we could see an engineer working away on it. He saw us and came over to chat. We told him our story about how we'd been riding the wooden mice through Indonesia and that this was the last one to do. He was very apologetic but by ways of an apology he offered to show us the ride, which we of course accepted.
There's no transfer track on this ride, instead the cars are removed from the track at a specific section in the station. It's surprising how easy these things tip off and how much faith has to be put into the track, the brakes and that silver disk poking out the centre to stop the cars coming off.
He also allowed us to not just walk the lift hill but walk around the top of the ride too. This one seems to have more bridges than the others. Whilst we were up there we continued to talk about the ride and it's history. Monty (the guy's name) told us that he knew the coaster resided in Perth before coming here 11 years ago and he'd been working on it the whole time it had been here. He knew prior to Perth, the ride was in America but no-one knows where.
Realising how gutted we were at not being able to ride he decided to see if there was any way of getting us on it. He headed off to speak to the park manager, who we think was the guy on the desk, and came back saying it was his decision as to whether we could ride or not.
The covers came off the cars (loving the art)
The ride was fired up and having done one test run with him and a colleague he gave us the OK to ride.
To take use a local cliched phrase "Strewth!!", we got our ride. Just the one but it was easily the most heart in mouth single ride of the trip. Afterwards Monty was telling us about how there were 2 rough spots on the ride but we didn't encounter them at all. He clearly knows the ride inside out and having spent 11 years on it must know it better than most. It also showed how proud he was of this coaster. He was also extremely relieved that we'd made it around. The work he'd been doing when we turned up was on the brakes and he'd sent us around with some of them not connected. We were also very fortunate that the park was dead today. Had they seen us going around on it they'd have insisted on the same and things could have gotten ugly.
So we'd gotten all of the wooden coasters on the trip, a huge sense of relief and euphoria all round.
So giving him the biggest thankyou we could, I ran back to the ticket desk, and told the manager that we'd return the press passes and would be buying full tickets instead, which he was pleased about. We then made our way back into the park to spend some money and enjoy some rides.
There are two vantage points for photos of the ride. This one is taken from the top of the slides.
The side-one is taken from the big wheel.
Original wooden carousel.
Old school wooden waltzer, and even this looked very well maintained.
There were a couple of new rides for this season. Plunge is their flume splash ride.
Redback is their Disk-o.
We had a quick breakfast in the park's diner. That van is an authentic Australian made one.
This caught my eye. In Australia "Cream Soda" is called "Creaming Soda". No chuckling at the back please!
The park isn't massive but doesn't need to be. There are some charming touches such as the little lever powered mine trains and of course what park wouldn't be complete without the creepy clowns!
There's another of those old rescued trams. Loving the "Park Info Mate" sign, suitably Australian.
Haha! Love it! Bluey's is inside the Ettamoogah pub.
We liked this park a lot. It's much friendlier than the stuffy corporate parks in the Gold Coast.
As a final thankyou to the park's amazing generosity to us, we spent quite a bit in the gift shop. The car was a little too expensive however.
Any coaster trip is only as good as the tales you bring back. The best one to date had been the near miss with the mouse coaster in Indonesia but today gave us an even better story than that. To go through the emotions of possibly missing out on one of the must-do coasters on the trip to getting it in such a mind-blowing manner is so hard to put into words but our heart rate was all over the place the whole time we were in this park, and perhaps I should just leave it at that. Can't thank this park enough!
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