To The North

We left our hotel this morning and picked up our hire car.  The queue was long, so we had to wait for quite a while.  Once in the car, we drove out of the city and headed north on highway one.

Our first stop was at Pohuehue Falls where we walked into the vegetation and had our first experience of the noise the local cicadas can make.  When we finally reached the falls, they were just a trickle.

We decided not to go to Sheep World and stopped off at Dome Forest Walkway.  This was a heck of a climb, despite being only a 1km walk, going up to 336 metres with a start at about 180 metres.  The view at the end was back towards Auckland (second extra).  We planned to have lunch here, but the cafe was shut so we drove on.

Lunch was in Wellsford where we had toasties in a roadside cafe.

Further up highway one we stopped at Brynderwyn Scenic Lookout where we got a lovely view out to Bream Bay to some islands.  (Last Extra)  We had a cuppa here and managed to find some Apple and Feijoa juice - a fruit juice drink that was discovered on South Island last time we were here.

We planned to drive from here straight to our hotel, but ended up diverting towards the coast on a scenic drive.  We ended up at an oil terminal at first, but we then had a drive through a marina to One Tree Point were we had a view of the hills over the water - the hills feature in the main blip.

After finding our hotel we had a short walk down towards the shore (didn't find it - lots of vegetation in the water obscuring our view!) and then returned for dinner.