Bonnie & Joel's Excellent Adventures

One thing we learned from our companion-guide-driver Alex is that we may never get the pronunciations of NZ locales right. They do have some special pronunciation rules, such as the Wh in a word like Whitianga, a lovely vacation city on the east coast of the North Island, is an “F” sound. Evidently this gets funnier as our travels continue, will keep you updated.

So after a lovely breakfast with John, the voice actor who owns and runs a B&B, where he offered advice to Joel on how he could get started in the business….we loaded up the car, and left Auckland for a model train ride. Yep, we did come all this way to ride in a homemade train about the size that runs around Disney. To get there we drove south along the shore of the North Island. We drove around the Firth of Thames, a lovely name for a bay, passing sheep and dairy cows in a landscape that reminded us of Petaluma up north of San Francisco. The road had recently been damaged by a storm, so the going was slow and limited to one lane in a few places. All this made us run a little behind schedule, so we had a brief walkabout the small city of Coromandel and headed up another few kilometers to Dry Creek for the narrow gauge railroad.

Built by a former science teacher turned potter who bought about 70 acres that was once a very hilly farm that happened to contain a supply of terra cotta he could use to throw pottery. Problem was it was difficult to get the terra cotta down to the workshop, so he taught himself how to survey land, design & engineer and build a railroad. Seems he never married so he had time on his hands. He traded beer fo surplus rails, built his own locomotives and cars and made himself a little railroad. Up some very steep hills. He designed switchbacks where he has to reverse course to get up and down the hills. It was an amazing work of perseverance hard work and stubborn determination. He started work on it when he was 40 and laid each rail on the 5km railroad until he passed away at 80, just 2 years ago. Shortly after he had the initial track working for his clay, people started stopping by asking for rides. Thus sprang a business that supported a growing railroad, that subsidized what has grown to be an international pottery studio. Hundreds of artists apply for a residency at the Dry Creek Pottery Studio, and 5 are chosen each year. Whimsical art lines the railway and serious art is for sale in the “train station”. Poof…it blew our minds.

After a lunch that had the biggest mussels ever…

We headed over to the Eastern shore of the North Island to our hotel on Buffalo Beach in Whitianga. This area has water the color of the Caribbean and landscape that looks like a cross between Sonoma and the cliffs of Dover. Water was about 80 degrees. Tough place to have a day free of tours but NZ rules say that guides must have mandatory days off during longer trips, so Alex scheduled our first in this location. So Sunday meant going to the Beach!

After a late breakfast we had the worlds shortest ferry ride, less than 200 meters, across Mercury Bay to an area shown only by the name Ferry Landing, to explore the beaches and marine areas. Got some sun, sand and surf. Back across the ferry and home in time for cleaning up for dinner. A lovely way to spend a day.