Last week you may have noticed a slight decrease in posts. This was due not to a lack of things to post, but of time to post as parents were visiting. To remedy that, we will have a couple picture-heavy posts of the tourism locales we visited.
Location #1 was the Waitakere Ranges just west of Auckland. These are an extremely nice park next to Auckland so it is a must-visit and, as we had a rental car for the parents’ visit, we took advantage and went to the beach. The drive alone was a bit exciting as the roads are a bit on the narrow and windy side and I haven’t driving much in the past couple of months and my mother has not done much mountain driving ever. 
But we ended up at Karekare Beach without incident for our 8 km walking loop. It was one of the best hikes I have ever done, with only the San Juan’s, Lassen, Crater Lake, and Snoqualmie coming to mind as equal hikes. A little bit of everything on the hike with ocean, mountain, waterfall, thick brush, tall forests, sand dunes, and swamps on a single short track. I would highly recommend it to anyone. My pictures below hardly do it justice.
The first stop looking back down at the beach.
Intrepid hikers making their way down a nominal path for the first half of the hike.
Swamp.
We eventually popped out of the hills and onto some low-lying tidal grasslands.
The pictures started to look nicer as the clouds cleared up. It was a quite nice day by the time we made it back to the beach.
Somewhere I think we took a wrong turn and ended up on another planet.
Here’s to hoping I find something more exciting next time.
