No bugs through the night! 2 days in a row!
And I’m back on top of my daily posts!
We got up this morning, and for the first time and I don’t know how long, it wasn’t raining. It was a partly cloudy day, and the wind was blowing really hard. In yesterday’s post, but the wind was howling so much that it sounded like deep flutes were going off. It was like the sound of what happens when you blow across the opening of a bottle, but with a really wide opening, so the pitch was really low. That was pretty cool.
Anyway, we got up this morning, rearranged the car like always, and begin our trek east. The plan was to drive all the way around the peninsula from Tauranga to Gisborne and then all the way around the rest of the way, and then back up to Taupo.
We stopped pretty quickly, though, as there was a beach we’d had recommended to us: Ohope Beach.
So we decided to stop over at that beach.
Honestly, when we pulled up, we weren’t impressed at all. He was a rather commercial backdrop behind us, with nice looking buildings and whatnot, and a nice looking beach in front of us. Us. Nothing to write home about, but a nice looking beach. But as you are all well aware, we tend to like places that are not near civilization, so being in a beach right off the town wasn’t what we were going to be excited about.
That said, I decided I wanted to throw my shorty on and grab the boogie boards that we bought. I forgot to mention that we bought boogie boards. 🙃
So we went out into the water, Chase having exchanged his shorty wetsuit for a full-length wetsuit. I forgot to mention that as well. 🙃
Put the wetsuits, the water which already felt a little warmer than what we’d experienced before, was even nicer. Certainly wasn’t warm at all as the highs for temperature were only in the low 60s, and it was morning when we decided to go on out there, but it was still nice, and fighting all the waves to get out there to even ride the waves with our boogie boards, we weren’t cold at all. We rode for probably an hour or so in the section of the beach. That was right in front of where our car was. But after fighting the waves again and again and again to get back to where we were, as there was a strong southern pool to the current that would take us quickly down beach, we decided to move up beach so that when it pulled us down beach we would at least be back to the car and not just way down the beach.
We probably only went up the beach a couple hundred yards, but amazingly, the boogie boarding, even though the waves didn’t really look any different, the boogie boarding itself was much much better. I don’t have any reason to explain it, but just a couple hundred yards up the beach. We were able to ride the waves from where we caught them all the way to the sandy shore. Having the sand is self arrest our boogie boards.
That was super cool!
We had an absolute blast, and because we were able to ride the waves so far in compared to the spot just down the beach, we weren’t fighting nearly as hard or getting nearly as exhausted because we just ride in and then go right back out instead of having to fight up current and back out at the same time.
After hours of boogie boarding, we finally decided to call it a morning, both having had an absolutely wonderful time. Chase said it was the most fun he had ever had going to the beach which was pretty cool.
From there we continued our journey east around the horn or whatever you call it. We pretty much been driving all day since then, with only occasional stops to take pictures or to get out the drone and do Ariel footage and whatnot. We’ve done a couple of little adventure stops, but nothing really came of those stops. In fact, one stop where we thought we’d have a lot of fun exploring tide pools and what not yielded only one single minnow out of every tide pool and every deep water channel. There were no crabs. There were no sea urchins. There were no octopi. There were no fish. There were no shrimp. Nothing. One single solitary minnow that I saw in probably the second to last pool that I looked in.
Anyway, so that’s pretty much been our day today. It’s 8:39 p.m., and we’re still driving the coastal highway all the way around the Eastern Peninsula of the North Island. We’re probably going to drive all the way to Gisborne which is one of the towns that one of my brothers served his LDS mission in.
We might check in on some of the places and or people that he knew 25 years ago or so. He gave me some Google map links, so we might go check those out tomorrow.
Anyway, I’ll be back to finish up the post when we bed down for the night.
…
One of the things that I have loved so far about this drive around the eastern corner of the North Island is how many big rivers there are flowing from the mountains to the ocean. We’ve been driving the coastal highway, 35, pretty much since Tauranga, but right near the point as we started turning south, or somewhere around there, the land began to change and turn into a mountainary region with these huge broad shallow rivers with the mountains as a backdrop in the near distance.
It’s been amazing that even on something like our 10th or 11th day here in New Zealand, we’re still seeing vistas that make us go, oh wow!
And we haven’t even gotten to the South Island yet. We still probably have several more days of the North Island to go!
During the drive, we ran into a New Zealand couple, recently retired, that’s been traveling around on a short 10-day camper vacation. Vacation. The wife was originally from England, but she’d been here so long that she was a New Zealander. They told us about some of their trips to the United States, and how they had some wild wild west experiences in Wyoming with people open carrying and whatnot. Whatnot. Was a total culture shift for her. Kind of funny. 🙃
In another non-sequitur, we were reminded by and laughed again at New Zealand’s speed limit signs. It’s like the factory made about 2 million 100 km/h signs and only a handful of all the other signs, so when in doubt, just plunk 100 km an hour speed limit sign down on the road even if it’s a road that winds so frequently that 60 km an hour. Feels like you might kill yourself or someone else. It’s just funny. We were on a dirt road yesterday with sharp curves. Every 100 yards or so, but of course the speed limit was the New Zealand 100 km an hour. 🙃
And with guardrails being nearly non-existent, We joked about the combination of lack of guardrails and way over inflated speed limits as being a sort of population control. 🙃
Anyway, we bed down for the night on a little dusty dirt road beachside just east of Gisborne. We watched the first hour or so of the return of the king, and then I started getting tired enough that I had rather sleep. So we went to bed.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 
Are you okay? No post in a week.