Camping at Whites Bay

I had a couple of days between arriving back from Hamilton and Will arriving back from the UK on the 1st Jan. It was nice to come home to the Pohutukawa tree by our kitchen window in full bloom. The tui were certainly enjoying it.

It was also nice to come back to our three chookies. Their water source of choice is the birdbath, which is pretty cute. My friends Suzanne and Paul did a great job of looking after both the chooks and the garden while we were away.

I had a very nice and relaxed New Year's Eve, homemade pizzas and a few drinks around the fire pit at Paul and Suzanne's place. I then picked Will up from the airport on the morning of the 1st. On the 2nd we headed off on our biennial camping trip with the Roe family. Our ferry trip over was very misty and atmospheric coming through the Sounds...  

We met up with the Roe family in Blenheim, before heading off to the Whites Bay campsite just 22km from Blenheim. It's a magic spot with a beautiful beach surrounded by bush. The campsite is run by the Department of Conservation and had really good facilities (flushing toilets, cold water showers with pulleys to attach your solar shower for hot water) all for $6 per person per night! This year Georgia (who is starting her second year of university) stayed at home so she could work, and Alexander (who is starting his final year of school) brought his girlfriend Brittany along. We managed to nab a prime spot near the beach and set up camp.

Between us and the Roes we are now pretty well set up in terms of our camping supplies! We each have a large multi-roomed Kathmandu tent, and a new addition this time round is that we each have a big Coleman shelter. The green one is the Roe's which we used as the living/dining area, and the blue one is ours which was used as the kitchen.They worked brilliantly with detachable walls you can put up depending on where you want protection from the wind, or shade.

Our kitchen was also incredibly well equipped. We had a couple of chilly bins to keep stuff cold, a couple of pantries to store our food, with work surfaces on top, our Weber BBQ and a 2-burner gas stove for cooking, and literally, a kitchen sink!

Here are a couple of pics of the beach

The Roes camped with us for a week as Rach had to start work again on the 11th Jan. We had a lovely time with them (as always!) swimming and chilling out on the beach. Will and Rich went out in Rich's fishing kayak and managed to catch us our entree one day. There were also rocks absolutely covered in mussels which you could wade out to at low tide, so we also had them for our entree a few times. They were delicious cooked in Rich's fish smoker.

On the couple of days when the weather didn't cooperate we drove into Blenheim for bit of an explore and to restock supplies. Free wifi and the ability to charge up all our devices in the public library was much appreciated!

On several nights we had very nice sunsets. It was very pleasant taking a glass of wine down to the beach and sitting and enjoying it. Rich took the first two photos below, looking back through the hole in the rock. Will took the bottom two.

 

 

The Roes headed off on the long drive back to Dunedin on Saturday 9th Jan. It was another most excellent camping trip with them, and we'll look forward to the next one, probably in 2018...

 

Will and I stayed on for another 3 nights. In some ways it was a little sad with our camp being halved...

 Now that it was just Will and I, we had to resort to selfies...

We ate very very well on our camping trip. I had pre-prepared and frozen some meals which we used during the first half of the trip. It is also amazing how well you can cook on the Weber. This below was one of our favourite meals: lamb steaks, baked potatoes and sweetcorn, all done on the BBQ. Of course, eating outside with a beautiful view and a beer/glass of wine usually makes pretty much anything taste good!

There are several bushwalks of varying lengths that you can do from Whites Bay. One day Will and I did the Black Jack track which is a nice loop of an hour and a half or so, and offers some good views of the outer Sounds, and also nice views looking back to Whites Bay.

We also did the walk over the hill to Rarangi Beach which is meant to take an hour each way, but was substantially quicker.

One day we also scrambled up the small rocky outcrop on the right hand side of the beach which gave some really nice views. You can see our camp just above Will's head in the pic below, just to the left of the surf club.

Someone had dug a massive hole on the beach. It really was impressive. I could have lay down and had a bath if I had fancied...

In general around NZ the flax flowers have been spectacular this year, and Whites Bay was no exception. It was good to see the tui enjoying them.

After our 10 days of camping, Will and I had a couple of nights booked in the Harbour View Motel in Picton for a bit of R&R before our ferry back to Wellington. The motel was pretty awesome (as you'd expect from the #1 ranked hotel/motel for Picton on Trip Advisor...). I really like Picton and always enjoy my time there. The motel had an interesting view looking out over the marina.

Will always enjoys a good walk around the marina, dreaming about the boats he might possibly own in the future... We also spent a bit of time perusing the real-estate boards, dreaming about our holiday house in the Sounds we might buy to accommodate said boat...

On one of the days we went for a walk on the Snout Track. We got to the Queen Charlotte View lookout, but decided not to go the extra 40 minutes or so each way to Snout Head as the weather looked like it was closing in.

It was a little bit sad because at the lookout we ran into a very excited tourist who told us that she had just seen a kiwi bird! She showed us a photo, but it turned out to be a weka, of which we had seen a couple around the place. We did feel slightly bad for setting her straight and bursting her bubble...

It was a totally different sort of day for our return ferry trip home. We weren't sailing until the afternoon so spent the morning chilling out on the Picton foreshore and getting in one last holiday icecream...

 

We had beautiful views of Picton as the ferry pulled out, and managed to grab prime seats on the ferry, right at the front of the boat with big glass windows to enjoy the view as we sailed home.