Walking

Well, winter seems to be in remission a little at the moment, and we’ve been using the nicer weather to get out and about. One of our goals for this visit was to climb Rangitoto – a relatively young volcano in the Waitemata Harbour – a thirty-minute ferry ride across from downtown AK.

So last Saturday, we hopped on the ferry and, after a lovely boat ride, arrived at Rangitoto and set off… we decided to go around about a quarter of the base of the island, have lunch on the beach there and then head on up to the top. This turned out to be a more challenging walk than we’d initially planned for the kids – it turned out to be a 10km walk, and we spent most of the five hours we were on the island walking… and the kids both did brilliantly well – I wouldn’t have believed they could do it, but they did 🙂 . The views were incredible, the weather stayed dry (except for the first five minutes when we hid in the shelter at the ferry terminal, and for about five minutes while we were at the top and could hide in the shelter up there), and we got some wonderful photographs…

Not to be outdone, we took ourselves off for a lovely (if somewhat muddy!) walk in the Waitakere’s on Sunday – to the Kitekite Falls, near Piha. It was a nice gentle walk (although with a bit of climbing to get to the Falls) after the day before, but afforded us a lovely tramp through the NZ bush, and some stunning views of Piha beach and Lion Rock on the way home…

Pics are up on Facebook if you feel like taking a look…