An exciting day today - the Director for Infrastructure had offered to give me a tour of all the Games Venues to help bring it all to life!

The Games will take place predominantly on the Gold Coast. Some venues will just be overlaid by Goldoc, some require improvements and some are brand new venues. Some will be used for the games, others will be used for pre games training & to host complementary events

We started at the Coomera stadium - a huge box like venue costing $40 which will host gymnastics and netball but in the meantime is also home to volleyball & basketball courts. It only opened a few weeks ago & is already booked out for national competitions as well as being used by local community groups

After a quick stop off at the Goldoc offices were then went to the Runaway bay sports precinct, a huge sports centre which will be used for pre event training.

The Gold Coast are also wanting to diversity their economy and develop a health and knowledge precinct, specialising in scientific and medical research. Just behind the development is where the athletes apartments are being built.

Next was the acquatic centre which is a huge open air swimming & diving pool next to the beach & will be used during games time.

We then went to broadbeach lawn bowls club where they have developed a fantastic facility, and where the average age of their members is younger than the average age of the Australian cricket team!

Next we went to see the Cararra stadium which is another huge (almost finished) box building to host a number of sports inc boxing and wrestling. The athletics will be next door in the outdoor stadium which is currently a football stadium. Opposite the council have recycled the soil removed when building the new stadium to build new football & rugby pitches for the community to use

It was then lunch time so we stopped at yatala pie shop for one of their famous pies before driving onto the super sound stage. This is housed in the movie studios between the Gold Coast and Brisbane - currently they're filming Thor in there (as well as in the CBD outside my office!) but it will be a squash venue in 2018

We then went to nerang national park which will host mountain biking and then onto the velodrome which is also still being built. We then went to what I would describe as a shooting village, it's like a big park with lots of houses surrounded by trees - the houses are all local gun clubs. There were also lots of signs for kangaroos & koalas there but I'm told even the ecologists doing the environmental impact studies can't find any koalas so I'd have been lucky to see any!!