Heading South (with a few stops along the way)

We have been looking forward to heading back to the South Island, especially as our last trip there wasn’t all that we had hoped in could be thanks to us both getting Covid. The lead up to the trip was pretty busy with Judy’s 70th celebrations (see our previous blog), and the frenzy leading up to Beach Hop.

For those of you who don’t know, Beach Hop is an American Muscle Car festival, held in Whangamata every year. This year was different in that it was the 25th Anniversary, so lots of people and cars were coming to help in the celebrations. There were 2000 cars booked in, as well as classic caravans, and some fancy trucks as well.

Judy takes the bookings for those Caravans and Motorhomes visiting the event who want to park on the Whangamata Area School grounds – parking around 200 RV’s and 18 Beach Hop muscle cars.

So it was off to Whangamata for the first leg of our trip – to get the parking set out and to receive the incoming motorhomes. We went from an empty sports field to this….

By the time we left, more than half the vehicles had arrived and all was going well, and we were thankful to those, especially Rod, who agreed to take over so we could get away a bit earlier.

From Whangamata we headed straight down country. Our friends Dianne and Gary were flying to Europe on Monday, so we wanted to get to their place as soon as possible to spend a bit of time with them before they went. We grabbed a coffee and drove, not stopping until we reached Lake Whakamaru (thanks to NZTA blocking off State Highway 1). We pulled in to the freedom camping area on the side of the lake for dinner. We had not been there before but it was beautiful and clearly popular – there were lots of motor homes there, including an NZMCA rally.

It was nice to stretch our legs and refresh ourselves. The bottom of the lake looked muddy, and had that not been the case I might have had a swim. That wasn’t to be so after dinner we kept driving until we reached Turangi.

We had intended to leave by 8am the next morning, but in true Philpott style, we left an hour and a half late, but arrived to Dianne and Garry’s place, in Paraparaumu, just before 3pm. We had the grand tour of their new house, a coffee, and then jumped into their pool – very refreshing.

We had a great few days with them, but the boys didn’t enjoy it so much. Their dog Teddy was so pleased to have company he wanted to play and play, and when it didn’t happen he would either nip or nudge their butts to encourage them to play. Beau wasn’t keen on this at all. Garry had an electronic gadget that was supposed to be heard only by Teddy to get him to behave and mostly it did, but it also made Bruce behave (because he could hear it in his hearing aids) and it made the other dogs anxious because they could also hear it and had no idea what was going on! At one stage I had a shaking Foxy on my knee (belonging to a visitor), Bruce had a shaking schnauzer on his knee, the house sitter had another, and Bruce was calling out “what have I done wrong!” Teddy, all this time, was having a great time!

Anyway, it was a great, but too brief, catch up. Sunday we went on our way and stopped in for lunch with Brendon and Helen and had the grand tour of inspection of their new Dethleffs Alpa – a very impressive machine. I couldn’t believe the amount of storage that was in that motorhome.

From there we headed to Plimmerton NZMCA Park to wait until our ferry crossing. This is a big park, very well set up, with a big dog park next door. The first time we went there, one of the enclosures had 6 schnauzers running around. Hunter and Beau had a great time and wore themselves out. I had to admit though, that two of the schnauzers had very funny haircuts – designed to look like lions I think, and they were terrible barkers , which made me feel quite good about ours.

We leave here at 6am tomorrow to catch the ferry – South Island here we come!