The first full week

After the hubbub of Auckland we headed a little over an hour south along the east coast to a rural area called Miranda. I had booked a place through an affiliate of HomeAway/VRBO called Book a Bach NZ.
Our GPS took us there without a hitch after we stopped in a larger town Pukekohe to get some cash and groceries. (the banks here haven't charged any service charges at the ATM's so far).
The place was a lovely acreage with 3 head of cattle, a few chickens and three cats. Our hosts, Vic and Cecilia Man were so welcoming. They gave up their home to upgrade us seeing as we were staying a week. The place was excellent! King bed, super comfy, great kitchen and bath very nicely furnished and decorated. The icing on the cake was a hot tub, or spa, as they call them in NZ that was freshly filled every day with hot mineral spring water that was pumped right out of the ground on their property. Apparently it's quite common in many areas. It's a bit of a reminder of how geologically active NZ is.
We enjoyed a soak every evening before bed. Zzzzzzzzzzz
We used this stop as a hub for traveling around the area.
The first day after arrival we took a driving tour around the Coromandel Peninsula. What a beautiful drive. Crazy windy mountain and coastal roads.
The second day we drove out to Waihi beach and the Karangahake Gorge. Waihi beach is really a big, long beach with nice grey sand. It was good to get out and walk along the beach and find a few nice shells. After a beach picnic we headed to the Karangahake Gorge. Yes, the names of places here will easily have you tongue tied! This was an area of gold mining and a large ore crushing plant was built in the gorge along the river to extract the gold. Millions of ounces were produced in the plant. Nothing much is left of it now but there are several really great hikes around the area. One, called "the windows" has a few tunnels from the rail line they used to move the ore from the source to the plant. We walked through a few shorter ones but stopped at the longer one as we didn't have a flashlight and well I'm pretty sure JL would not have been able to do that tunnel even if we had aircraft landing lights to light the way.
After the gorge we headed back down the windy road and stopped in at the local golf course to check it out. Found out we could just walk on Friday morning and they had clubs for us to use.
Took the next day off, Thursday, from driving around to read and look for things to do on the next leg of our trip.
Friday we golfed the Hauraki Golf course. The clubs on offer were not that great but they were free to use so what the heck.
Really nice course. Pretty creek running through it (managed to lose 2 balls in it) loads of big beautiful trees and the back 9 was super hilly. We walked the 18 holes and were pretty tired at the end. It was so nice to have that mineral hot tub to soak in afterwards!
Saturday we drove up the coast on the East Coast Highway. What a pretty and curvy road. Stopped at Kaiaua for an ice cream. I had the much loved Hokey Pokey flavour, vanilla with bits of sponge toffee. YUM!
Sunday morning we visited the Miranda Shore Bird reserve. The amazing Bar-tailed Godwit can be seen here. They aren't much to look at, but their migration route is AMAZING. They fly nonstop from Alaska to winter in New Zealand, then they go back to Alaska via China!
It was a nice little walk to the bird hide and there was a guide there and a good spotting scope.
The rest of the day was laundry and getting ready to hit the road next morning.

Sunrise from our window

Looking down towards the hot pools

Our private hot mineral pool with view

Kitchen

Super comfy King

The herd

One of the despised possums brought from Australia in the 1800's. Someone making fun....

Many roads signs are fun for us

Waihi beach

People enjoying the lovely beach

Hot water beach

At Hot Water beach but unfortunately the tide was in

The quirky humour at the Ngatea Water Gardens

These and many other similar signs found in the parking lot

Koi pond. You could purchase them too!

Water lilies 

There was the "Canny Museum" at the gardens, a room about the size of a one car garage full of empty cans from all over

A lovely lotus blossom

More of the area countryside 

Really tall hedges found all over the place due to prevailing winds

Some pretty beach grass at Waihi beach

And flowers

An Oyster Catcher having lunch

An old mine shaft

The rail that was used to move gold ore to the crushing plant

Part of the trail

Remains of the processing plant

Another part of the trail system around the old gold mine operations

Delicious NZ fare. Massive Green lipped mussels, new potatoes and fresh summer corn and beet greens.

The Hauraki Golf course 

Our hodge podge rental clubs and trundlers (pull carts) They actually didn't charge us for either!

Pretty pond at the golf course

A magnolia tree

Pohutukawa tree

Random pretty scenery pic

The site of our Saturday walk

A pretty stream but alas....

Starting our hike.

Giant tree ferns

A stoat trap. Yet another introduced species wreaking havoc. :(

This photo doesn't clearly depict how steep the trail was and it climbed for what seem like forever!

About half way up there was this very nice lookout over the Firth of Thames. I might add this isn't my first firth. My first firth was the Firth of Forth on the way to Dunfermline :)

The view from the top heading down the trail

As seen descending the trail 

At Kaiaua

Some black swans and other ducks

Fennel originally escaped from a garden....

Now a noxious weed.

Native mangrove

Firth of Thames, a wetland of international significance. The site includes shallow estuarine water and mudflats, shell banks, grass flats, mangrove forest, saltmarsh and limited freshwater swamp margins.

The Godwits taking to wing

Showing a bit of how deep the shell banks are.

A White faced heron sitting on a shell bank or Chenier plain