Sox and the kids and I headed up a day early from the rest of our gang, and drove a very, very twisty turny road to Mahia Beach. Thankfully the kids slept most of the way, or I am sure they would have been felling pretty green. It was a warm day, close to 30°, so being in the air conditioned car was a great break for us.
Along pretty much any road in New Zealand you will see livestock; sheep, cows, and goats are plentiful. On the drive to Mahia we actually saw turkeys in a field. Cool!
The highway was inland a little, but when we did emerge back on the coast, it was quite a spectacular sight. The turquoise water sure looked enticing, and the large waves looked fun to try and play in. Since this wasn’t our destination, we kept going.
We found our bach and it was pretty rustic. Particle board floors with throw rugs over top, cupboards stuffed with throwaways from other houses, and not as clean as we had hoped. Still, we were only there for a couple nights, and it was more than adequate. The upside was we were only a two minute walk to a fabulous sandy beach. Yoshi would have loved it!
One interesting thing about Mahia Beach was that there were a lot of tractors parked in people’s yards. There were also lots of boats. The tractors were used to launch and recover the boats from the very shallow entry beach. When recovering the boat, they would come into the bay, someone would jump out, wade in to shore, back the tractor in, then the boat driver would just drive the boat up onto the trailer. Cool.
That night I got out to take some pics of the sunset. It sort of fizzled, and the light was never quite right, but there was a nice rainbow that I took a few shots of.
