The big wheel!

For just over a year now, Brisbane has had a big wheel. And not just any big wheel - this one has held Eli's attention like no other. Every time we drive into town he has to see it out his window and if it's at night time we have to try and guess what colours it will be (it's normally white, but was once all pink for a fund raising event and on the odd occasion it has also been blue on the outside and red in the middle). The big wheel has become such a distraction for Eli that he typically won't fall asleep in the car (no matter how late it is) until we've seen the big wheel and discussed, at length, it's colour.

Given Eli's fascination with the big wheel I decided that we needed to experience the wheel up close. So when Grandma Susan came to visit we headed down to Southbank to take a ride. Eli was very excited about it and chatted about the big wheel all the way into town, but I don't think he realised quite how big the wheel is until we were at it's base. I think he might have even been a little bit anxious at that point too - here's a photo of him studying the design and structural integrity of the big wheel before we climbed on board one of the gondolas.

I snapped this next shot as we headed up on our first rotation on the big wheel. As frequent visitors to this blog will know, Eli's not normally quite this subdued.




Here's a shot of the two of us together at the very top of the big wheel; and one with Eli peering out the window while sitting next to Grandma.




As you might expect, Eli took to the ride really well and didn't seem at all worried about how high we were. He had great fun spotting the buses, trains, trucks and CityCat ferries that we could see and he agreed that people down on the ground looked a lot like ants, which might explain his general eagerness to stomp on both people and ants when he's down on the ground...



By the time we'd been around the loop a few times Eli was so comfortable that he even started looking straight down and was starting to find new and inventive ways to sit in the gondola. In some ways I think it was good that the adventure ended soon thereafter, because I imagine he would have started jumping up and down or rocking the gondola from side to side if we'd been on board much longer...