Holiday at Cooks Beach

Here's my diary notes I wrote up while we were driving back on the Sunday afternoon from Hamilton.  The drive back was much better than I thought it was going to be, usually the Sunday of the last day (for most people) of Holidays is mental.  Heaps of traffic leaving Napier towards Taupo, but quite a quiet road in the direction that we were travelling.

Sunday 2nd Jan: We packed up the car, fitted the topbox ontop, loaded that up.  Took Biscuit to the Kennels, got everything into the car, said goodbye to the house and set off for Hamilton.  Because it'd be a 5+ hour drive directly to Cooks Beach we split up the drive by stopping in Hamilton for the night to stay with Di's parents.  They have the most amazingly beautiful old house.  Huge high ceilings, probably a 1920s house I guess?  It's on this huge plot of land.  Amazing.  They are lovely people and very kindly let us stay there the night.  We arrived and met up with Ben and Di who'd already been there for the last week having had Christmas etc there.

Monday 3rd:  We set off from Hamilton not too late, after I headed out in the morning to buy milk and coffee.  We got everyone the kids into our car, Ben/Di/Jacob and Abbey in their car and we set off.  We met up with them in Paeroa, where we got a photo in front of hte big L&P bottle, before stopping the visit the L&P Cafe.  Theo raved about the L&P Milkshake that he got all Holiday.  Beth started to go a bit funny, very quiet, very grumpy.  She told Sarah that her ear was starting to ache.  Maybe too much swimming in our new pool?  Anyway we stopped in at Thames on the way to Cooks Beach, we managed to find the one Pharmacy that was open. They couldn't give us anything like antibiotics for her ear, but they gave us some drops.  Beth by this stage had perked up a lot anyway after some Pamol.  Good thing too, the only medical centre open in all of Coromandel was the Thames Hospital and the lady at the Pharmacy told Sarah it was an 8 hour if you had a problem and needed to be seen.  Ouch.  We leftThames and headed off to the accomodation.  We got there and it was a camp ground just like the Taupo one we go to, except this time we had a "Chalet" instead of a tent.  I mean it was just a small building with 3 rooms.  2 rooms had a double bed and 1 room had 4 bunk beds in it.  Perfect for 4 adults and 4 kids!  We got unpacked and headed off to the pool for a quick swim.

Tuesday 4th:  I got up early and went for a run - Gotta earn a beer later on. I also put Bluey on the TV for the kids - I bought my laptop and Chromecast etc to be able to play things for them.  The Internet was totally poked, it really didn't work at all, so I'm glad I bought local media to keep them entertained. That morning it was a scortcher, so we headed down the beach which was about a 15 minute walk from the campground.  We took the beach tent, Ben took their beach umbrella.  We had a lovely couple of hours at the beach, the kids all learnt how to boggie board, Theo especially LOVED it.  Beth had to be convienced to give a go, but once I finally talked her into it she loved it too.  The only problem was the waves were a little dumpy and there was a (very small) undertow which wasn't great.  Nothing to be too worried about.  Oh and Sarah lost her sunglasses in the surf which was a bit sad.

Once we'd finished up at the beach, we headed back to the campground for more swimming, some lounging and then we went to dinner at the local resturant The Vessel.  Had a great meal.

Wednesday 5th:  I got up early again (well the kids wake me up) and went for another run.  A pretty poor one, it was too hot!  After that we drove to the Ferry Terminal (~2km from our campground) and then caught the passenger ferry over to Whitianga.  We found a nice resturant where they served the quickest meal I've ever seen.  We ordered and within 5 minutes, if not less, hot cooked food was being brought over to us! We even mentioned it to the chefs on the way out!  The girls went shopping, we took the kids back another swim in the pool/book reading session.  That afternoon we all went to Hot Water Beach and dug holes, though actually someone was leaving and gave us their hole which was great.  The kids had a great time playing and splashing.  And we made a big scene of "protecting the hole!" we were in as the tide slowly came in.  Eventually of course the tide breached our hole and we were flooded with cold water, as which point we all laughed and gave up and headed home.  Except poor Abbey - I prehaps hadn't explained clearly to her that we were just playing a game and that at some stage the tide would enter our hole no matter how much we built it up.  She was pretty sad.  Still a great fun time otherwise, lots of sun sand and splashing.



Thursday 6th: Went for a run, 6km this time.  Then we went to the Hehai Market - fek it was hot.  HOT.  I lined up for 40 minutes to get food from a Thai Carvan, there was only 2 food trucks.  At least I picked the one that didn't run out of food with a huge queue still, so eventually get got a decent feed.  It was worth the wait.  We had a quick look around the market, the kids went on the 2 rides they had.  Then we caught the Park and Ride up to top of the walking track into Cathederal Cove.  What a great walk, though it was hot.  At least we knew when we got there and played for a while we could just catch the Water Taxi back instead of having to walk back up the hill.  So we got to the beach and FUCK ME the sign said the Water Taxi wasn't running.  So that meant we had to spend quite a bit less time there than we would have otherwise, and we'd left it quite late in the day so we only really got an hour and a bit to look around before we had to break the news to the kids we had to WALK BACK to the top of the hill to catch the bus back down.  Oh well.  Beth just WENT LIKE A SOLIDER. No looking back, hardly talking.  Just got on with it.  Amazing. The boys had sticks and played with those the whole way back.  So it was quite a good mission.  One the bus had dropped us back to the car we filled up with Petrol and Sarah ordered Fish and Chips online for us for dinner.  I went down to get them and got a message on my phone saying the order had been cancelled.  They'd run out of Fish.  So I stood in line and ordered again and, bless them, they rang us an hour later to say the food was ready so Ben drove down to get it.

Friday 7th: Walked from the campground along to the Eggcentric cafe. Had a coffee there before walking a bit further along to "Cooked", funny name for a Mexican restaurant but the food and drinks were great. Turned around and walked back to Eggcentric cafe where we got an ice-cream.  Walked back to the campground, I went down and got pasta for the kids dinner, the adults were full from our Mexican lunch.



Saturday 8th: Time to packup and leave.  We leave the campground and stopped again in Paeroa on the way to Jilly and Coach's (Di's Parents) again.  Di found a nice cafe called The Distillery which had amazing food, really really nice.  We got to Hamilton, Theo pestered Coach (Paul) to make a Bow and Arrow same as he'd made for Jacob.  Paul being the kindest man ever spent an hour walking around with Theo looking for the "Perfect Stick" and made one for him.  Theo was then promptly in tears because he couldn't fire it very well, so I spent 15 minutes with him showing him how to shoot it.  Once he got the hang of it, he was away laughing and can shoot it about 10m now.

Sunday 9th: Drive home day.  We packed up, said goodbye to everyone and went to visit Sarah's friend Kelly and see her new baby Cooper and Kelly's Partner Chris.  Stopped in to say hi for ~30 minutes, then hit the road again.  Stopped at the Cheese Tasting Coffee place in Putaruru (Over the Moon) and then got some lunch from a cafe over the road.  After the long drive we finally made it back home, everything was just as we'd left it, just the weeds were bigger.  The pool was still blue though, horray for the Self Chorinator.  Beth and I went to pickup Biscuit and he was so excited to see us he nearly had a fit.  Once we got him home, he was utterly knackered, you can tell all he'd done the time we were away was to run run run run.

And that was our little Holiday away!  The only thing I haven't mentioned was New Year's Eve/Day but we didn't really do much for NYE, put a Youtube countdown on at about 9:30 for the kids, then wen tto bed about 10:30pm ourselves.  New Year's Day was mostly yardwork and getting ready for our trip.

Happy New 2022!