The sunhat at the end of the tropical holiday

My small family and I may as well have been holidaying in a low security prison.

It was only when I was preparing to leave Australia after 11 days in Noosa that I bought a sunhat.

In the departure lounge of Brisbane International airport I impulsively clicked on one of the advertisements that had been popping up on my phone ever since I searched for ‘‘big head hats’’ four weeks before.

A few minutes later I had ordered a wide brim hat for more money than I would usually spend on a fancy dinner. It very nearly made me cry.

The emotion was not because of the cost. Though this, of course, did not help.

The eye welling was because after 11 days on the Sunshine Coast it should have been impossible that I didn’t already have a hat.

I should have been forced to buy one on the very first day simply to avoid sudden onset melanoma and sun blindness.

That I had not was because for nine of the 11 days of my tropical paradise holiday it rained. Not just ordinary, pass-in-a-minute, goodfor-the-garden rain.

Real rain. Big rain. Rain that’s preceded by two animals of every kind being invited for a cruise on a massive wooden boat.

And while Noosa is probably one of the more fantastically beautiful and pleasant holiday destinations you will ever find, when it rains it is just the same as anywhere else.

My small family and I may as well have been holidaying in a low security prison.

Our choices of things to do were limited to looking out the window with a wistful anger, trying to read a book through weather induced tears or watching Kung Fu Panda II for the third, fourth and then fifth time.

It was as close to torture as you can get without breaking laws.

My wife, 3-year-old son and I weren’t alone in our suffering.

We soon discovered it is mandated by Australian law that one third of all Lucky Country couples with pre-school children must holiday in Noosa in the second and third weeks of October. It may even be in their constitution.

We knew this because after four days of being shut inside we hired a car to visit Mooloolaba’s wet weather proof undersea aquarium world and discovered they had all had the same idea.

I’m not sure what the collective noun for 2700 Australian preschoolers in one place is, but I would like to volunteer ‘‘screech’’ or possibly ‘‘dysentery’’ as being suitable.

It was not unlike visiting a laboratory where the monkey’s have escaped their glass cages and are blind drunk on their new found freedom.

So while we were quite relieved to be out of our apartment and away from any more of Disney’s finest family movies, it is fair to say we swapped one trauma for another.

As a measure of how affected we were we spent 20 minutes waiting for a 30 minute fur seal show of the sort that was becoming cringe worthy in 1972.

To be fair it wasn’t as bad as I had predicted but that could have been because, by that stage, I was suffering from a meteorological lobotomy and so enjoyed the sight of Bobo, an elegant speciman of evolutionary perfection, barking on command and waving hello with his big wet fin.

On the two occasions when the sun did come out for longer than seven minutes, the effect was interesting.

We did not leap out into it and revel in the sunshine we had been so looking forward to. We peered at it suspiciously through the mesh curtains of our ranch slider.

We were scared and we did not trust it to last. We had lost faith in Noosa.

One time we did try to make the most of it and it began raining as soon as we stepped out the door en route to a date with a riverside barbecue and a carefully prepared tub of king prawns.

After an initial retreat we threw caution into the water soaked wind and walked to the river anyway, where I grimly cooked the prawns and hoped no one would bring about their murder by laughing at me for barbecuing in the rain.

That I am back home would indicate they didn’t, or at least that the flood waters have removed any evidence of my crime.

The lesson we have learned from our rain soaked tropical holiday is that sometimes in life you are unlucky.

It was nothing directed at us, it was not a test of endurance from an all powerful being, or a message from mother earth to never leave home again. It was just bad luck.

Needless to say we’ve still taken it personally and if we ever visit Noosa again it will only be because Hell has experienced its own freak weather event.