Rain and the Road...

Napier, New Zealand

April 30, 2007

Drip, drip, drip… was the sound of rain hitting our tent when we woke up this morning, and it meant another day of rain. We’ve been pretty lucky over the past week; it has only rained at night, allowing us to explore the island during the day without getting wet. Unfortunately, this morning we had to put away a soaking wet tent—at least we weren’t floating on water like last night!

We packed up the truck and headed out of the Holiday Park. We decided to grab some breakfast in town and come up with an alternate plan to our day hike in Te Urewera. The trailhead was about 140 KM of out of the way, and we didn’t really want to hike in the driving rain.

We opted to head towards Lake Taupo and explore a few of the sites in the area before heading to Napier, our final stop for the night. We stopped at Huku Falls near Lake Taupo to view the “spectacular” falls accordingly to the New Zealand Tourist Board. The falls lacked, well, a fall, and instead the water roared down the river more like a Class 5 rapid. A couple of tourists actually approached Shelby and I on the trail asking us to point them towards the water fall; we explained the “waterfall” was actually the rapids they just passed. Oh well, at least we got to take a break and walk around in the rain for awhile.

After leaving the falls we took a quick drive to the next New Zealand natural attraction. Large craters, emitting plumes of steam, are scattered across Crater of the Moon park. Vigorous growing fauna in all shades of green surrounded the red, orange, yellow, and blue mineral deposits in the bubbling pools. As we walked through the park in our Tevas the earth below our feet was actually warm; reminding us that the WARNING signs in the park were posted for a reason. The views were spectacular; however, we couldn’t help imagining the vivid colors on a sunny day… maybe next time.

We left Crater of the Moon and continued our Road Trip towards Napier. I continued to admire the fall colors as we drove down the two lane highway. The leaves were displaying their bright Autumn colors; something we definitely don’t see in California.

We finally made it to Napier and found a great room at the local Top 10 Holiday Park. The room slept four, had a kitchen and a bathroom and plenty of space to dry-out our tents... pure luxury! We decided we would relax and stay “home” and have a nice home cooked meal. We sat around the table and drank several beers, including the beer from Sawmill Brewery, and just recovered from a long drive and a day of rain.

We’ll cover more mileage tomorrow as we head to Wellington, but hopefully it will be without rain.