Friday January 31, 2014

A great start for todays ride a 14% hill to walk up !!  The rest of the day was hilly but no other hills that we had to walk up, which means it was a good day.  At about 12:30 we were only 20 kms from our end point and decided to stop for lunch in Waverley.  When we started again the wind had picked up and was blowing us a little sideways.  Which was a little scary on occasions as on this section of Highway 3 there wasn’t much of a shoulder.  We negotiated the 20 kms safely and arrived in the small Town of Patea, we spotted the sign for the only camp site in Town and followed it to a small Council run site.

No one was here for us to register.  We checked out the price of a cabin that was posted on the kitchen door, the doors were open on two of the cabins we decided that we could afford a cabin for the night.  There was an honesty box where we could pay for the cabin, if no-one came around for us to pay.  We made ourselves comfortable in the smallest of the cabins and hoped no-one had reserved it.  We figured it was such a small out of the way site it wouldn’t be very busy.  Wrong the other two cabins were booked for the week-end.  It was o.k. when the person who manages the site came around he was really nice and let us stay where we were.   The cabin cost $25.00 and we had full use of the fully equipped kitchen and free laundry, a great find

Today we got our first view of Mount Teranaki, a dormant volcano – let’s hope it stays that way.  We took photos and Ralf said  “Wouldn’t it be great if a cloud was over the top of it so it looks like the beginnings of an eruption” well his wish came true.

Our camp site in Patea was very close to the beach which had fabulous black sand dunes. We had a walk up to the lookout and then down to the river estuary before cooking dinner.

As we had plenty of time in Patea, I thought I might have a chance to update the blog but no internet service here.  The first place in New Zealand where we couldn’t connect to the net, when we wanted to.

This was my afternoon shot of the coastline near our camp site.