By Elliot
Distance: 7km
Today was supposed to be a rest day. But while we were walking yesterday, I hatched a plan. To shorten our next planned walking day, we could lazily make our way from the holiday park on one side of of Mangawhai, to the one on the other.
We started with a walk to a nice cafe for breakfast. We had coffee, I had shakshuka and Ruth had some kind of savoury plate with avocado and other good stuff. Unfortunately, I remembered to photograph too late, so I can only show the table.
We spent about 2.5 hours over breakfast planning the next section of trail, all the way to Auckland.
From the cafe we made our way to the supermarket, to re-supply for the next 4 days. We had to buy another tube of sunscreen, even though we bought the last one 10 days ago. Usually, one tube of sunscreen lasts us months!
Once we’d finished shopping groceries, it was lunch time. So we kept walking. Half an hour later, we were at a different café.
We had lunch , which included a chocolate cheesecake for dessert. From there, we walked 15 minutes to our campsite for the night. Overall, a great day!
I want to expand a bit on our planning. In general, every few days we need to figure out the next few days of trail. We need to know where we can resupply, which up until now has been the driving factor for how many days we need to plan for. We also need to know the potential places we can stay on the trail, and then figure out the distance we generally want to walk. If two places to stay are close together, we might want to skip over a spot to make our days longer.
The trail has an app with trail notes that sometimes list accommodations in the trail description and sometimes in the middle of the trail directions. So we do a close reading of the text, try to extract all the relevant information and then try to shape several days of walking of a length that we are happy with that doesn’t also mean we have to carry many days of food. It’s a bit of a puzzle, which confounded me at first, but I’ve grown to like doing it. And the great thing is that the rest of the time, the planning had been done and I can just enjoy. Our big trip is being divided into many mini-trips.
Anyways, tomorrow we don’t need to plan again until Auckland: we can just enjoy.
Please enjoy this picture of this morning’s sunrise over our campground.
