No, it's not unwanted puppies making sad faces or Toy Story 3's ending. It's a video put out by Auckland Council about the Hillary Trail. If you want to take 5 minutes and watch some gorgeous shots of New Zealand, this video is spectacular. It made me cry because it has finally hit me that we are leaving here in only a few short months and these places are real and we live here. We've been to these places. And we're leaving. Aaaand now I'm crying again.
When you watch the video it breaks the trail into 9 different sections. We've done sections 3-7 over the course of our two years (actually hiked them, not just visited the beaches). So just keep that in mind that WE'VE BEEN THERE when you watch it, because some of the shots are otherworldly in my opinion. How incredibly blest are we? So just enjoy, maybe catch you breath and squeeze out a tear for both the beauty and for my sake.
PS This is Maggie writing this. Lance wouldn't cry.
There's a gorgeous 8 km hike connecting two black-sand beaches on the west coast (Bethells and Muriwai) called the Te Henga. It's a section of the Hillary Trail, a 76 km hike around the Waitakere Mountain Range, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who was the first person to summit Mount Everest. The Te Henga is Lance's favorite hike and he's done it 5 times now, but only once in completion. In January he was finally able to go the full length because I dropped him and our friend, Kevin, off on one end and picked them up at the other. They did the 4 hour trek with their sons on their backs while I kicked back in the Kumeu wine region in between. They hit some storm clouds near the end, but overall they had a lovely day for it and got some gorgeous pictures.
Lance really wanted to go back again with both me and James to get a family picture at the top, so we went back again in March. The pictures below are from both trips.
Lance here. After getting back into Auckland from our Christmas break with the Jespersens we decided to head up north to go camping with our friends Kevin and Katie and their kids Elliot and Whitney.
We stayed at a really nice campsite right on top of the beach, where James did his normal thing of loving playing around on the beach and destroying our sand castles.
As always the day was spent with the boys chasing each other around the beach.
The boys had a really fun time playing in the tents and jumping on the air mattress. We got this perfectly timed picture of Elliot's face plant.
The next morning, as always, James had us up before the crack of dawn. It wasn't a completely bad thing in this case as we got to see the sun rise over the Pacific ocean. That's right, we watched the sun rise over the Pacific- how many of you guys back home say that? (Hands down everyone who's ever lived in Hawaii.)
We then set off for a hike around Mangawhai Heads to take in a beautiful January summer day. The trail was about 30 minutes south of the campsite along a beautiful, coastal drive. The boys had a great time playing in the parking lot with the birds, and we had a tough time corralling them when it was time to start the hike.
Unfortunately for us we missed the tide marking by about an hour and weren't able to do the circular route, so we headed back along the gorgeous beach. Tough life, eh?
We passed a sand dune on the way back from the hike. Since James was awake I had to run up it with him so he could get his fix of seeing Dada struggle for breath. He was quite happy running down the hill and really wanted me to go up again. However, once a month is about all the old legs can take at this point.
