Pancake Rocks

We have a lot of cloudy, rainy days here on the West Coast. Wednesday, however, was bright and sunny all day (today is, too—yay!), so at lunch time we decided to take the afternoon off from working on the girls’ room and take our friend to Pancake Rocks. It turns out that the world-famous geological formation is only about an hour from here, so if anyone comes to visit us, we may well take you there.

Just going to Pancake Rocks is quite the scenic adventure! The road winds along the coast; here, I took a picture out the side window of the van at the part of the road we would be on in less than a minute after going across a small river.

The swells were pretty high that day because of an air mass that had come across from Australia.

Because we had someone along with us, we decided to try to get a family picture. I’m not real happy with the shadows on our faces; any of you have an opinion as to whether we should get prints made for family in America, or try for a better one?

There was some action in the blowholes already at 4:00. High tide was just before 6:00, so we decided to drive just a short distance to a track that takes you down to the beach, then come back here and walk around the blowholes again later, when there would hopefully be more water spraying up through the rocks.

The Truman Track goes through some amazing ecosystems. This was two trees or more, grown together.

When we came out onto the beach, we could look south from the viewing platform and see this:

or north, and see this:

Part of our happy crew. This is, from left to right, Simon, Little Miss, Mr. Imagination, Mr. Sweetie, and Mr. Intellectual.

Gayle wanted to get a closer look at a small waterfall shooting out of the cliff, so he, Simon, and our friend who was with us raced the waves across the beach. The tide was coming in, so the waves were coming in farther and farther. The rest of us stayed on the viewing platform and watched.

Here are two pictures Gayle took with his phone.

As we went back to the van, we noticed this pool with a perfect reflection.

Back to Pancake Rocks. I admired the silhouettes of the palms and cabbage trees.

There was a bit more action at the blowholes, but not as much as we saw another time we were there.

To top off a wonderful day, we got to see the sun set over the Tasman! And then, we hurried back and enjoyed a picnic as it got dark before we thankfully got into the warm van to go home.

One last rock formation as we took the trail back to the visitor’s centre.