Jack and Katrina's Place

More photos from August, after the agricultural aircraft conference we managed to abandon Guy with his Granny and escape for three precious nights at the Black Sands lodge at Piha beach. Piha is on the west Coast, 45 minutes drive west of central Auckland. It is a special place where the feeling of being on the edge of the world runs right through you. The feeling of isolation is even stronger if you arrive on the eve of a storm that plunges the upper North Isalnd into a state of emergency and leaves Piha township without power for 14 hours. Luckily the lodge has gas cooking, so we cooked a steak for dinner, using the maglight on Mum's car key ring to see if it was done. The water supply was from the roof but via a now useless electric pump, so we left the salad out on the deck to get washed by the storm. We did manage our first really long sleep in about 3 years, 14 hours from 7:30pm until the sun peeked through the dissipating storm clouds at 9;30am the next morning.

The next day cleared nicely after a hailstorm to test our resolve as we set off to walk the Cascade Kauri track. This track takes about 4 hours and visits a ridgetop stand of Giant Kauri trees. The top half of the North Island was once covered in these trees, but here in the Cascade reserve the hillsides were too steep to extract the logs, and the remained to become one of the countries first reserves. Hard to capture in the photos but these are huge and ancient trees, but look for jack and katrina the'tree-elves' in the first photo.

And then there is the beach, looking west 2000km to Australia somewhere out beyond the fading sun. It's a special place and we were lucky to be there.