Day trip to Carindale.

The Carindale Shopping Centre has had a face lift, and I haven’t been since it opened some time ago.

 Because this house sit is not far from Brisbane, it’s easy to go into some of the bigger shopping centres for a day trip. I was looking forward to some new shops, and hoping to buy a couple of pieces of clothing for the summer.

I have to say, it was a really disappointing trip. There were some new shops, but it mostly seems to be for the younger ones. Perhaps they are the ones with more disposable income these days. As I do not have a nymph-like figure, I was looking for some larger sized clothing. Well, there seemed to be little around, and what there was didn’t appeal at all.

A couple of my favourite shops have gone, Millers and Katies are no longer there, and K Mart apparently was never there, but I didn’t realise that. They have certainly improved the size of the mall generally, but the food court was the same size.

One of the things I found a bit tricky was the lack of information. They had touch screen information points, but they seemed really limited in what you could ask them, and there were no brochures with the layout of the mall, well I didn’t see any.  I know there is a concierge desk somewhere, but I didn’t come across that.

Then the parking. This is one of the malls that has introduced parking fees after the first three hours. We knew that before we went in and collected our ticket as we entered. We stayed about four hours, so knew we would have to pay something. But what we didn’t know was that you had to pay it as you left the mall building and before you went to the parked car. We didn’t’ see any signs to tell us that! We drove to the exit boom gate and were stuck. The machine told us we had to pay $3, and to put our credit card in, but it wouldn’t accept it. The cancel button didn’t work. We were stuck there with other cars pulling up behind us, unable to go forward. Peter tried backing up, making those behind us also back up, but that was dangerous. So I got out and found an emergency button, pressed that and spoke to a lady who informed us we should have paid at the mall. She said she would raise the boom gate so we could exit, and next time we should pay as we left the building.

Blow that. The shops I like have gone, and the parking is a bit of a pain. We are not keen to return. We’ll stick to something like the Helensvale Mall, free parking, easy to get at and has all the shops I want.