Our Final Stop, The Bottom Of The North

May 18

On the way to the bottom of the North Island

Jenny delivered an outstanding breakfast of homemade crepes with warm apple compote, coconut yogurt and raspberry jam. The apples came from the orchard on her property.

We packed up, loaded the car and headed to Whanganui’s Saturday market where we grabbed coffee and a too sweet French macaron from one of the vendors.

There was a lot of road work going on so it took us longer to reach our destination than we had planned. We detoured through the towns of Marton, Bulls (lots of funny signs and shops) and Levin, where we discovered that Zack had opened up his own motel.

We finally arrived in Raumati (“summer”) Beach on the Kapiti coast, about 35 miles north of Wellington, to have lunch with Paul and Sue, whom we met on our Queen Charlotte hike back in January (ages ago!).

It was such a treat to have a home cooked meal while traveling for as long as we have been. We had such a nice time catching up with them and thoroughly enjoyed our visit. After lunch we walked down to the beach and through the village for some fresh air. It was a bit nippy (and windy), but it felt good to walk.

Forty or so minutes later we blew into Wellington, our final destination of our four month trip! The wind had started really picking up in Ruamati Beach and we quickly got a lesson into why this place is called Windy Welly.

We checked into our Airbnb and had about thirty minutes to refresh and change for dinner before meeting friends we met on our Abel Tasman hike last month.

Ortega Fish Shack was awesome and a far cry from a shack. Great food, a buzzy vibe and such fun catching up with Tracey, Dave, Baz and Kerri.

After dinner all six of us piled into the car for the local tour of town. Baz drove us to the Mt Victoria lookout for beautiful views of the harbor and city at night.