A Weekend, nay One Day, Trip to the Coromandel

This past weekend was Labour (where'd that 'u' come from?!) Day weekend here in New Zealand. There's actually some interesting history related to it, but essentially it's a free day to commemorate the NZ struggle for an 8-hour work day back in the 1890s. It's celebrated on the fourth Monday in October every year. That kind of makes it like (USA) Thanksgiving - suddenly you're at the end of the month and you get a day off work. Since we are in high spring here, that means this is a holiday weekend as well (like Memorial Day). 

After loading up on junk food and coffee, Rhiannon and I set off early on a Friday morning to beat the traffic induced by Auckland's holiday diaspora. Our destination was a 3 hour drive down and around the Firth of Thames (just a great name, apparently firth = bay) to get to the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula. The Coromandel is known for good hiking (both in the mountains and along the sea), gorgeous beaches, and numerous seaside towns dotted along the coast. 

Winding up and over a lush and low mountain range brought us to Tairua, a small coastal town with a nice brewery, a small art gallery, and a wicked public playground. It also has a sandy and extremely level (can something be extremely level?) tidal flat that you can walk several hundred meters onto when the tide is low:

Sandy island that quickly disappeared as we were shooed away by the climbing tide.

When you're on a shell-infested tidal mud flat, you do hand stands. It is known.

We then continued on to our destination for the weekend, Whitianga (FIT-ee-ayn-gah), stopping along the way for a quick hour long walk at Cathedral Cove. At the time I had no idea, but Wikipedia now tells me this is both where some recent filming occurred:  a scene in The Chronicles of Narnia:  Prince Caspian (that's the only reference to that you'll ever see in my blog) and a portion of a Macklemore video. Anyway, it was a lovely little walk filled with some cows, quails, and nice vistas, ending on a secluded beach:

Get off my beach I live here now.

"Wow this is where Macklemore once stood." 

And when we got back to the parking lot there was this very sad one-footed winged rat atop my car:

Had a real taste for dried cranberries and being pathetic.

And then a few excellent beers at a local brew pub to cap off the day:

Really the best APA I've had so far in NZ. I'm a beer snob apparently

And...that's it. I would love to show you more pictures and regale you with loads of other interesting and fun things we did over the weekend on the Coromandel, but I can't.

Ya see, that night we ate some grilled chicken. I woke up a few hours later feeling like death had crawled deep inside me and was clawing its way out, and I was inconsolably (and often violently) ill for the whole evening. I didn't sleep a bit, and we decided to drive back to Auckland the next day. I spent the rest of my Labour Day weekend convalescing and eating toast and apples. I tell myself it wasn't a total loss because the weather was crap all weekend. Now I'm just steeled to try to visit it again, naturally avoiding grilling chicken at a campsite..

Cheers!

Bonus:

During my recovery, Rhiannon and I made some Halloween-themed decorated cinnamon-ginger sugar cookies. Some of them are really scary, so it's okay to look away now before it's too late. Happy Halloween!

We only had black food coloring, so our palette was white, grey, and black.