Nought to torrential in 4.5 seconds

Nought to torrential in 4.5 seconds

With all the weather warnings and thunderstorms, we decided to spend another day at Hamilton.  It was a nice, cheap site, and there was a track leading down to a stream that we could use in the intervals between the downpours.  And when it rained, it really did.  There was no warning, it just tipped it down.

Fortunately, there were only three or four other people staying there so we had almost exclusive use of the TV lounge and kitchen.  On the first evening we got chatting with another couple who live close to our next destination.  They’d just bought their motorhome in the south and were travelling home but stopped because they couldn’t face doing another couple of hours in the rain.

Then we hit the road again, heading west on SH26.  We were driving on a fairly open plain to start with, apparently a dairy farming region as we went past a couple of dairy processing plants.  Just as we were remarking that we hadn’t seen any mountains, this one loomed up out of the mists!

This was at Te Aroha, where we turned north to Paeroa and then took the Karangahake Gorge road to Waihi.  Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of this due to the rain and lack of stopping places.  At Waihi we met up with an old friend – the Pacific Coast Highway – which we followed to today’s destination, the harbour town of Tairua.