Best Things Nearby:
Grocery store is across the street. HUGE mall is only 5 minutes away. South Beach is 20 minutes south and Ft. Lauderdale Riverwalk 20 minutes north.

Best Things About the Resort:
It is peaceful with well maintained gardens and huge beach.

Resort Experience:
If you want to relax, this is your place. We come here to escape the cold winter every X-Mas. Onsite, you will find a full service spa, free laundry facilities, library (with internet access), pool-side bar, and a great Italian Restaurant. Aventura Mall is 8 minutes away. Grocery and gift shops are right across the street. South Beach is 15 miles south of Golden Strand.

• Unit Type: 1 Bedroom
• Activities: Fair
• Amenities: Good
• Unit Satisfaction: Good
• Family Friendliness: Good
• Service: Fair

This is our home resort where we come back to every year, so I am a little biased. It is a nice, recently remodeled complex with 6 different buildings and several villas. The best thing is a huge beach and olympic size pool. It is always full during X-Mas weeks, but there is plenty of room for everyone. You do have to get up early and reserve a chair by the pool. Every unit 1broom and up has a full kitchen with everything you need. We love it - that is why we go back there all the time.

The facilities in this 1930’s old wooden post office in the middle of nowhere were limited and nowhere near top of the range but the hostel came to be one of our favourites, primarily for the real Aussie characters that run it.

Peter bought the backpackers for the aboriginal community. A seventy year old of few words, he is a local legend having reputedly been shipped as an orphan to Australia after WW2, run away from his Freemantle orphanage at 15 to the Top End to become a stockman, eloped with a local aboriginal girl, becoming a highly respected figure in the mainly aboriginal community, and giving drunks short shrift to get off their backsides and make something of their lives as he had to. This solid weather beaten man in a well lived in oversize felt hat gruffly greets the Darwin bound Greyhound at 2am in an unmarked van with "You backpackers? Get in." It has apparently taken years to get him to drop his well intended "ya bastards" from the end of this greeting. Arriving in the hostel he limps heavily across the wooden floorboards, a bad hip apparently exacerbated by falling from the hostel’s windmill he was repairing a few years ago. In a booming whisper he announces the Ladies dorm and the Men’s dorm, crashing open the glass panelled doors onto the bunks behind. Much to the protesting sighs and pronounced tossing and turning from the dorms he insists on giving us the full hostel talk. At 2.30am we creep as best we can into the remaining top bunks, and sleep fully clothed for fear of causing any more of a disturbance.

In the morning we meet Rod, the hostel manager, one of the souls Peter has rescued...in this case from women. Rod is as gruff, has a bit of a hangover after the weekly barbecue attended by many of the local aboriginals, but is very chatty and gives us the second tour of the facilities. Behind his cheeky grin and endless Pom jokes, he wants us to enjoy our stay, and is hurt and astonished by the factually incorrect write-up in the Western Australia LP. Waiting for the early morning bus on the day we left he and a couple of wizen old would be fishermen sat up playing draughts with us and telling us the Peter’s and local history. On leaving, not letting truth stand in his way, he informed Peter that I called him ‘the bastard’ with full Australian drawl. I began to fear being stranded at best, but a deep belly laugh came forth and he grinned all the way to the bus stop. As if forewarned of the storytelling, he dropped us off saying "you don’t want believe everything Rod says". Dorm beds are $15 in this Outback experience.