Slow Your Pace, Fill Your Soul and Take a Shine to Australia’s Gold Coast

Gold Coast isn’t just a beautiful beach. It’s also a place with great restaurants and places to browse.
Slow Your Pace, Fill Your Soul and Take a Shine to Australia’s Gold Coast
A bird's-eye view of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast and its myriad skyscraper hotels and condominiums. The Gold Coast extends for some 40 miles along southeastern corner of Queensland and contains dozens of suburbs, including Surfers Paradise. Mary Ann Anderson/TNS
Tribune News Service
Updated:
By Mary Ann Anderson From Tribune News Service

From the passenger seat in a small helicopter lifting off from Sea World’s heliport, sunlight reflects off the startlingly vivid Pacific. From my bird’s-eye view next to the pilot and as the small craft hovers against a cerulean sky, I can see all that glitters actually is gold on Australia’s Gold Coast, from the exquisitely clear water with its surface shimmering like scads of diamonds, to splashes of sun mirroring off windows of the towering hotels, and to the greenery of the faraway mountains and bush.