We went to the North Island last month because we had been invited to a conference hosted by some Mennonites from the United States, Canada and Australia. It was held near Cheltenham, just north of Palmerston North in the Manawatu, at the home of some friends of ours who own a conference center. We spent three nights there, and the first morning a lot of us went to a nearby reserve where we walked a track around some native bush.
This isn’t native… but it was pretty interesting! I’ve never seen such huge bamboo. We have stands of it here on the Coast, but it’s very small.
We also stopped at the Stormy Point overlook and had a look at this amazing river valley. Below this picture is a video clip that gives a slightly better idea of the view.
When we left Cheltenham, we drove to Drury, just south of Auckland. It was really interesting seeing the scenery that was so different from the South Island. The mountains had really interesting shapes!
I think this was Mount Ruapehu, but I’m not sure–and we couldn’t see the top of it.
We stopped here and had lunch at a nearby picnic table. I thought it was a beautiful toilet block!
Miss Joy gets carsick, so we stopped for a few minutes to let her walk around. There were blackberries there!
I was startled to see this bright red soil–the first time I’ve seen that in New Zealand!
We enjoyed seeing the sculptures in a lot of towns along the way. We didn’t manage to get pictures of most of them, but Elijah grabbed this one in Ohakune. There was a giant gumboot made of corrugated iron in Taihape, colorful cows in Morrinsville, and bulls in Bulls.
We spent two nights at a community in Drury while we accomplished our other goal for the trip–applying for passport renewals at the United States Consulate. I’ll do a post soon about our day in Auckland, but here are a few pictures of Miss Joy, enjoying being out of the van. She was delighted to find a cat!
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