Staying at the beach house in Waikanae, I woke to chilly horizontal rain.
Which is actually an improvement on the heavy downpours we had overnight. Yikes. I’ve spent most of my worrying energy the last few weeks on assembling all the gear we’ll need, and getting the roster sorted at work, so that I haven’t actually been thinking much about the trip itself, apart from keeping the occasional eye on a worrying trend in the weather reports. The North Island has been hit with deluges this week, with a number of deaths from landslides and people getting swept away down rivers.
There are group of eight of us going on the trip this week.….
Monday afternoon 26 January
So much for that! Just as I was writing the above post I got a call from the trip organisers. The plan was no longer to drive up to Taumaranui on Saturday, proceeding to getting on the river the following day. It was still raining up there, so the trip was likely to be postponed to the following day at best. I was all for heading up anyway, since we had accommodation booked and it would be easier to be on site to organise everything. However, I was voted down. The rest of the group were still in Wellington, but since Samantha and I were already in Waikanae we decided to stay. We had a great day, doing a cycling loop via Peka Peka and back on the cycleway beside the expressway, with a stop at the garden centre cafe for lunch. Admittedly it was cold and wet at times but it was still lovely. Then we went to see a film at the Paraparaumu shopping mall movie complex, a fun near-future police procedural called Mercy, like Minority Report on a budget, with Chris Pratt rather than Tom Cruise. After the film we did some more last minute shopping for our trip at the Kathmandu there.
We decided against eating out, so had a spa and then a simple pasta meal followed by apple pie whilst watching an old DVD of The Princess Bride, another great movie only slightly marred by several scratches on the disc. I’d forgotten how annoying it is when they pause and then skip around intermittently while you’re watching.
On Sunday I was drinking my morning coffee, and wondering when to wake Samantha up , when I got another phone call. The organisers had found another website that gives you live information on river flows. They gave me a long explanation about cumecs (cubic metres per second), which were at that time around 600 when they needed to be a quarter of that to be safe. It would take days for the current to drop, and that was if the rain stopped – and we still had rain forecast for the next two days at least. In short, the whole trip was off. They’d been brainstorming back up plans overnight, and the best option they’d come up with was to do the Queen Charlotte track, taking the ferry down to the South Island on Wednesday. I said I’d discuss it with Samantha and rang off.
I woke my daughter with the news that the trip was off, and that we were under some time pressure to decide whether to join the others or not, because they needed to start cancelling things and rebooking elsewhere. I was really loathe to go back to Wellington, which felt like a backwards step. In the end we decided to do a road trip instead. With all the recent rain, there’s still plenty of devastation that we needed to avoid, which ruled out Northland, Bay of Plenty, and the East cape, so we’re going to limit ourselves to the lower North Island.
We phoned relatives in Hawkes Bay to check whether an impromptu visit would be acceptable, went for another bike ride along the Waikanae river, packed up and set off early in the afternoon.
We had the occasional drizzle on our way North East but the road was clear and it was a lovely drive. Samantha did all the driving and I even had a little nana nap around Dannevirke.
Were warmly welcomed on our arrival in Havelock North and had a delicious meal of perfectly barbecued Hawkes Bay lamb with excellent company before collapsing into bed by 10.
We’ve spent today at a more relaxed pace. A leisurely morning of excellently prepared coffee and then we walked to the Redwood Grove at Te Mata Peak, which took around an hour in the midday heat. From there we picked up a few essentials – wine, cheese, etc – at the local Hastings shops, which are a lot more upmarket than I remember from when I lived here as a junior doctor back in the early 90’s. A light lunch and then back to the house for a nap.
it’s early evening now, and there are black ominous looking clouds in the sky and the occasional rumble of thunder. The Whanganui river flow rate is currently 537 cumecs, down from a max of 700 in the early hours of this morning, but the rain is still falling. I’m certain we made the right call, not only to cancel the river trip – out of our hands, anyway – but to do the road trip. I’m sure the Queen Charlotte would be great but I’m having a really good time.