Training Log Archive: jennycas

By the time I'd finished breakfast, it was raining. But it wasn't cold yet, so I went out anyway. Explored the walking tracks up to the clifftop lookout in the Shakespeare's Cliff headland just down the road from our accommodation, then went down the steps to tiny Lonely Bay & back up again, across the bridge into Cooks Beach township (rain was coming sideways as I ran along the beach itself) as far as the monument to Cook's observation of the transit of Mercury in 1769 then back to Flaxmill Bay including one hard 4-minute hill up the gravel track to the lookout.

Came back to our cosy dry unit, had a drink and a banana, looked at the weather forecast and decided to do tomorrow's planned run today also - up the washed out slippery steps to the lookout above Ferry Landing, down the very rough path to the landing and back along the beach road to Flaxmill Bay.

Plan for the day had been to go to Cathedral Cove, but a) the walking track to the beach is closed due to washouts after last week's rains, and b) the water taxi from Hahei wouldn't have been taking passengers to the cove in this weather. So we crossed on the tiny little passenger ferry to Whitianga instead, getting completely wet in the process of walking down the main street, and then sheltering & dripping in various galleries & coffee shops for the afternoon. To drive around the harbour to Whitianga would be over 40km, but the ferry takes only 2 minutes. Given the amount of rain which is likely to fall overnight, I'm not sure that staying at the furthest point of a dead-end road, with a couple of streams to ford between here and the highway, was the smartest of ideas but it has been a beautiful spot and we will definitely have to come back to see everything else the Coromandel Peninsula has to offer.