A Gold Coast minimoon: Day 1

My beloved and I got married last month, but decided to postpone our honeymoon for around a month, due to my study commitments. Before we even started planning our wedding last year, we knew that we wouldn't be able to have a long or expensive honeymoon, owing to a lack of annual leave (see some of our recent adventures here and here) and our purchase of a new house. As such, when we became aware of very cheap flights to the Gold Coast, we were quick to snap them up. After all, who doesn't crave a bit of sunshine at this time of year?!

Our adventure started early Friday morning. Very early, in fact. Our alarm was set for around 4am, but our delightful cat babies decided a 3:30am wake up call was instead necessary. We shivered our way to Melbourne airport in a zombie-like state and only hours later arrived in sunny Queensland. Our first order of business was delivering our bags to our hotel - the Sofitel Broadbeach. The airport shuttle delivered us promptly to our destination, where we were offered a discounted room upgrade (yes please) and informed that a bottle of sparkling would be coming our way later in the evening to celebrate the occasion of our honeymoon (double yes please!).

Next on the to do list? Breakfast. We opted for a cheap and cheerful nearby option. A generous plate of "greasy" for $10? Don't mind if I do!

Next on the agenda: Movie World. We may be dangerously close to thirty, but that didn't stop us from being total kids for the day. Highlights were the Stunt Driver show, Arkham Asylum, Superman Escape and the Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster.

After a really fun-filled day, we returned to our hotel, where our complimentary bubbles awaited.

We cracked open the bottle and enjoyed our sparkling with some wasabi peanuts (a cracker combo, in case you were wondering!) and this outlook:

Rather tipsy, we headed out to investigate dinner options. The Urbanspoon iPhone app was particularly helpful in navigating Broadbeach eateries. We ended up settling on Freshly Stacked, a gourmet hamburger joint. 


We started with a delightfully fragrant pale ale each...

...then we moved onto onion rings, which were tasty, but needed to be crisped up a little more.

Our final "course" for the evening consisted of burgers. I ordered the Firey Bite (left) and my beloved selected the Fillet Up (right). 

Both were delicious and I was particularly impressed by the kick of mine - all too often menu items heralded as spicy are far too bland. This was, however, not the case. Success!

At around 9:30pm and after an 18 hour, jam-packed day, we fell into bed exhausted, but very content.