Me and my family escaped death on a theme park ride because I was misbehaving

I apologise if this is hard to understand, I am not a great writer lmao. This is a throwaway account. I have never told this story nor has anyone else involved.

In October 2016 me, my older brother, my mum and my dad went on a trip to Gold Coast, Australia. It started as one of the best holidays I’ve ever been on. The trip was for my dad’s work, but they made it so each employee could bring their family. I remember spending a fundraiser dinner at movie world. The whole park was closed except for this function (about 50 people). Me and my brother along with some other kids rode the green lantern ride at least 30 times. Then ate hotdogs in the kids area before riding the scooby doo ride for the rest of the night.

On the day before we had planned to leave, we went to dreamworld. Most families had gone home at this point but we extended our trip to visit some family. The day was going amazing, I can’t lie though it has all become a blur after all these years (I am 19 now).

But the last half hour we spent at that park I will never forget.

It was late in the afternoon and we had planned to go back to the hotel after one final ride. My brother wanted our last ride to be some massive roller coaster and I wanted to go on the river rapids ride. My brother (the sweetheart he is) only argued for a bit before giving in. I think he could tell I was scared of the coaster that he wanted to go on. Even though I was trying to act tough, I remember him hugging me before leading me to the river rapids queue, my parents following behind.

When we got to the line we realised that this ride was packed, the queue was way bigger than any other ride we had been on. My mum said we should choose a different ride but I begged her to go on this one. She and my dad ended up agreeing because we had those fast passes that let you go in a smaller line.

I should let you know that I am the most impatient person on this planet, and we had been waiting in this line for around 20 minutes. Every other line with our passes had taken 5-10 mins at most. Being a young child with adhd who had eaten way too many lollies and had been moving around all day in the Australian heat, I started behaving like a grumpy little shit.

I had been whining the entire time even though I was the one who insisted we went on this ride. When we got nearer to the front I started annoying my brother. I started poking him and it ended with me stealing his toy that he had won earlier. My parents gave me a warning to behave otherwise we would leave, seeing as my brother didn’t have any desire to go on this ride he wouldn’t be upset if we left.

Me being me, I didn’t listen. We made it all the way into the raft when I started full on smacking my brother. My parents had enough. my mum apologised to the worker while my dad led me out the raft, my brother following behind completely unbothered because he probably just wanted to go back to his Nintendo in the car. (Also yes I know I was immature for an eleven year old.)

I don’t remember a whole lot of details as I was too busy getting mad at my parents to look around, But I do remember seeing the now empty raft we had just been on take off down the river. I still find it odd that the workers sent the empty raft out instead of putting another group on, but I assume it was because their were people getting on the rafts behind ours so they didn’t want to let someone in the queue cut infront.

I had no idea of the bullet my family had just dodged. Actually I didn’t find out until we were at the airport the next day. We were in the lounge waiting for our flight, my brother was on his Nintendo, I was talking to my dad and my mum was reading the news on her phone. Suddenly my mum went pale, she grabbed my dad and showed him her phone. He grabbed it and whispered ‘oh my god’.

Me and my brother kept asking what happened until they told us. They just read a news story saying that a group of four people died on the river rapids ride due to a malfunction yesterday afternoon. It was a shock for us all, a mix of feeling horrible for those people but also scared that it could have been us.

When we got home I realised just how close it was to being us. I searched up the accident and now that it had been a couple days there was more info. Basically an empty raft had got caught in the machinery because of a water level malfunction. Then a group of four people smashed into it and flipped over, not only drowning them but getting their heads stuck in conveyer belt machinery and stuff. Search up Dreamworld river rapids accident Gold Coast to see the full explanation.

It was too much of a coincidence for it to not have been our raft. Not only was the incident the same afternoon as when we were there, the place was so busy I doubt there were any other empty rafts. Even though the raft we would have been on was only stranded and not flipped. They both were pushed, the only reason our raft didn’t flip was because it was empty.

I never talked about this to my parents, I was honestly too traumatised. I don’t even know if they put two and two together and realised it was our raft in the accident.

Tldr: The raft me and my family would have been on crashed with another causing four deaths. The only reason we weren’t on the ride was because I was misbehaving.