The Big Pineapple

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Handsome Australian and I have taken the kids on holiday this week to sunny, tropical Noosa, Queensland. There is so much on offer in this area, it's hard to decide what to do with ourselves each day.

The hotel we are staying in has a lovely pool that seems to have a strange spell cast over our four year old. She wants to constantly be in it. Never mind it's actually quite cold and she spends all of her time sitting in the small spa alongside the actual pool, it seems the pool is all she can talk about. She actually said to us, "Mum and Dad, I'm going to keep asking you if I can go to the pool until you say yes." And true to her word, she did exactly that and has done so every day since our arrival until we finally give in. She's persistent and clever and while I find the endless pool requests a bit on the annoying side, I have to commend her for setting a goal for herself and achieving it. She's going places...well, to the pool anyway.

The Handsome Australian and I actually decided today that our daughter will make the perfect 'resort holiday' customer. She loves the idea of a hotel and she loves the pool. Every time we make mention of leaving the hotel and venturing out into the wider world, she protests and protests loudly. We aren't sure where she gets this tendency as the Handsome Australian and I are generally anti-resort (well the Handsome Australian is anyway, I reckon I'd be happy to give it a whirl once) and we like to get out and see what there is to see and do what there is to do in any place that we visit. We used to spend our holidays, before we had children, on the go. We'd leave our hotel early in the morning and wouldn't come back until late at night. We'd pack the activities in, doing as much as we possibly could in the time we had.

Now that we are traveling with the under 5 crowd, we've had to taper our schedule a bit and rethink our activities. So today after we peeled our four year old's fingers off the pool fence one by one and carried her kicking and screaming to the car, the Handsome Australian announced that we'd be visiting the Big Pineapple. The what? Yes, you heard me The Big Pineapple.

What could be more exciting than a super huge Pineapple sitting at the gate of a pineapple plantation just near Nambour (and just down the road from Noosa) here in Queensland? Well, my friends, the Big Pineapple and the accompanying gift shop, cafe, pineapple plantation and informative tours are really something to be experienced.

For the uninitiated, Australia actually has a collection of Big or Giant things all around the country. It's a weird Australian phenomenon. Don't ask me to explain it, because I can't. There are just all these iconic giant structures dotted around Australia that lure people in to visit them. They are generally a bit run down and dodgy--just your run of the mill tourist trap. Think of all those bizarre snake farms you see advertised on highways in the USA and you'll get the idea.

But back to the pineapple...the Handsome Australian was excited to be in the vicinity of one of these Big things and decided that we must visit. Upon arrival, our kids loved it. They were running around the gift shop, cafe and the Big Pineapple itself like they'd been set free in Disney World or something. They LOVED the Big Pineapple itself and really liked the fact that you could climb the spiral staircase inside and look out over the top of it.

The Handsome Australian was unimpressed with the Pineapple itself and thought it was in dire need of updating. Mind you, we paid nothing to see it and what did he think was going to be inside this Big Pineapple anyway? The inside is just as tacky as the outside. I thought this would have been an obvious conclusion, but the Handsome Australian seemed to expect more. Poor guy.

Here are a few photos from our adventure:

See the logo looks promising...

Now that's a Big Pineapple. You can't eat it, but you can climb it--well inside it anyway!

Here's another view from the parking lot...a very quiet parking lot I might add. Hmm, perhaps that should have been a sign...

This is the view of the pineapple plantation from the balcony of the gift shop and cafe. Both the Handsome Australian and I were amazed to see that pineapples actually grow on plants on the ground. We had both wrongly believed they grew up high in trees. Lucky we stopped by the Big Pineapple today so we could get our pineapple facts straight. (Oh and that little train thing you see is the tour you can go on. We elected not to take the tour of the plantation as we didn't think our kids would get much out of it and it would have cost us something like $40 AUD for all of us)

More pineapples growing on the ground and not in a tree. Who would have thought!

Stay tuned for more adventures at Queensland's greatest tourist spots tomorrow...