Day 1,827 of Traveling the World | Northland & Doubtless Bay, New Zealand | February 2, 2023

Another five-year post, since today, for this February 2 post, it is February 1 in the US, where we started our epic journey. So…of course…being Groundhog Day, we get to celebrate all over again!

This area north of Auckland is collectively call the Northland. As we said yesterday, we were told to expect rain and misery on our 200-mile trip to Cable Bay. We were gifted with a beautiful, sunny day, dry roads, and scenes that likely looked exactly the same hundreds of years ago. This area is timeless – no glitz, no big development. We must have commented ten times on how lucky we were to be driving in this dreamy, scenic area. We didn’t really know these were going to be our views; we just wanted to go to the most northerly part of NZ since we had never explored north of Auckland. Are we ever glad we did! We started talking about what a great place this would be if we were ever put in Witness Protection, where we could live a simple life with gorgeous scenery and never be found or found out – this area would be ideal. We think it very unlikely that a Tony Soprano would stumble across us in this tiny corner of the world. Some people might consider Lilyhammer, Norway (to invoke yet another Mafia-related and Witness Protection TV show), but we think it gets substantially colder there. You don’t think we watch too much TV, do you?

We have rented a huge house with views of Doubtless Bay. The address of the house is Cable Bay, but that is just a small settlement on the southern side of Doubtless Bay. Captain James Cook sailed by the bay’s entrance in 1769 and recorded in his journal that it was “doubtless a bay,” hence the name stuck. Our drop-dead gorgeous photos of beaches below are all Doubtless Bay, as we drove about 20 miles to the Karikari Peninsula today and stopped whenever we had a place to park near the bay. Every view is stunning. The photos after that are from yesterday’s drive north, all along the highways. They really are timeless. Judge for yourself! (This post feels so much easier to write than the one yesterday about flooding and rain! Our travels are usually so much more like these past two days: sunny, good weather, and glorious places with magnificent views!)

Doubtless Bay – beautiful water, distant mountains, big clouds, and in this one, fronted by some beautiful pines.
We liked the rolling lower bank of clouds.
The ocean colors are unreal!
A paddle boarder on a mostly deserted beach.
Don’t you think it looked like this 1,000 years ago??
You can see one of the flooded fields after the epic rain. Everything was very green.
This is another beach on Doubtless Bay. You can see tire tracks – two trucks were just slowly driving on the sand.
The same beach, empty except for us and the trucks.
A beach along yesterday’s drive.
The other end of the beach above…
…another “eternal, never-changing” photo (except for the fence of course)…
Hobbits could live here! (But that is next week!)
We were addicted to all the scenery we saw along our way.
The clouds were always a big part of each photo.
The deck on our rental house spans its entire length.
The view from the deck.
View from the side.
Out on the deck this morning, we saw this family of quail walking on our driveway – two adults and five chicks, so it must be mom and dad with their rugrats!

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