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!)
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