Cape Reinga

It has been great these last 2 weeks to be able to take time to see New Zealand and just have the responsibility of leading worship on Sundays. I have loved every day getting to enjoy God's beauty and read the word. It's been awesome to soak up the Lord before term starts and I am thrown into the middle of craziness.

This week Ellen’s cousin Tahlia and her husband Phil are in town from Brisbane Australia. Since they do not live here we have gone on quite a few adventures, which has been great for me to actually get to see some “tourist” type places. Yesterday we went on a road trip to Cape Reinga. Cape Reinga is the northern most point of New Zealand. It was amazing. The reason they wanted to go there is because the 2 oceans meet there and if you have enough of a westerly wind you can actually see the dividing line where the two oceans meet. We were able to see a little bit of that line.

 My it's way to early and cold to take pictures face :)

We departed early in the morning as it was a long drive. On the way we stopped at Kawakawa because they have amazing toilets. Check out the picture. It was really cool. Most of it is built out of glass. Then we continued to head north and went through a lot of small towns. The entire drive was green hills everywhere. Just picture the shire in Lord of the Rings and you have a close idea of what it is like.

When we finally made it to Cape Reinga we walked around and went out to the point where there is a light house. (I took pictures of this one just for mom because it was much nicer than Tutukaka) You can’t really see in the pictures but there is a color change between the 2 oceans.

  

 

 

After a while walking around and hanging out we started our drive south. First we found this little bay and stopped there to take a look. It was beautiful and my first time on at a New Zealand beach. We walked around the rocks and walked all the way around the corner looking for anything in the rock pools. After about an hour we headed back to the car and made our way south.

we decided to climb a tree

We stopped at a little fish and chips shop for a late lunch and ate our food at the bay nearby.

Then we realized we needed to get fuel asap. We kept driving and driving only finding closed gas stations. Finally we reached a town with a station with 8km(4.9 miles) remaining in the tank. It was close but thankfully we made it.

We then headed back north to the Gumdiggers buried forest. It was pretty cool. At one time there was a major catastrophic event that buried an entire forest of Kauri trees. The Gumdiggers would dig to the trees to get the Kauri gum out of them. This is why Rain boots are called Gumboots in New Zealand.  It was amazing seeing all the trees underground. While talking about it, we decided that it was probably Noah’s flood that wiped them all out. It is kind of cool to think that we were looking at trees that may have been buried during the flood.

 
The picture on the right is one of the massive Kauri trees that was burried.

After the gumdiggers forest we made our way back south and home. We drove through a lot more towns and saw a lot of northland. It was a beautiful day spent with beautiful people.