Northland
Once we had returned to Auckland, it was time to prepare for our final adventure before Stefan had to leave New Zealand! Having explored the highlights of the rest of the country, the last one on our list was Northland, the peninsula extending above Auckland.
This had actually been on our list from the very beginning–known for its beaches + warm weather, and with place names like the “Bay of Islands,” you can imagine our interest was piqued! In fact, before we decided way back in February that traveling south > north as winter approached made a lot more sense than the opposite, we were eyeing HelpXs in Northland (principally, one which would have involved taking care of a litter of newborn puppies…there’s an alternate pandemic timeline out there where we spent 5 weeks of lockdown doing that rather than where we ended up!).
Now, with our time together in New Zealand rapidly coming to an end, we wanted to check that final objective off the list. Delayed by what was called “one-in-500-year” rainfall, however, we scrambled at the last minute to rebook everything and push our itinerary back. With Stefan’s flight booked at the tail end, this unfortunately meant severely condensing our planned trip. Originally envisioned as a relaxed exploration up the east side of the peninsula and back down the west side, our finalized trip cut out the latter and crunched the former into a smaller number of days with lots of driving. Even so, as you’ll see, we still managed to see the big spots we’d intended and Northland actually ended up being one of our favorite parts of New Zealand!
If the above video’s length didn’t tip you off, we actually did much better than normal about documenting our travel via video. So rather than rehashing every step of what you just watched, we’ll just point out a few small areas that we didn’t have footage for:
Around Russell, we took a cute little ferry to get our car across the water. It was only a ~10 minute ride, and it seemed like a lot of people did that on their daily commute…pretty cool!
On our way back to Auckland, we stopped at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. The Treaty of Waitangi was the initial 1840 agreement between the British and the Maori, and it has a similar place of cultural importance and contemporary relevance as the United States’ constitution. The Treaty Grounds have the house the treaty was signed in, a museum dedicated to the history behind the treaty, and several other neat features such as the 123-foot long waka which was built for the treaty’s 100-year anniversary.
Despite the compressed timeline of our whirlwind tour, we both loved Northland. The beautiful beaches, warm weather, the incredible sand dunes, and the absolutely gorgeous Cape Reinga were an outstanding combination. While it might not edge out the more common sights that a typical New Zealand vacation would take someone to, it would absolutely top our list of places you might not typically see recommended. And being so close to Auckland, if you have an extra couple of days around your flight, we think it’s absolutely worth checking out!
Our next blog post will be the FINAL one covering our time together in New Zealand!! In it, we’ll talk about our last days in Auckland before Stefan’s flight, a retrospective on our trip as a whole, and what the future holds for our blog (advance preview: our next post won’t be the last one you read here!). With our wedding coming up in a little more than two weeks, we really want to get this final entry out to finish one chapter of our life before starting on another–if you’re following our blog, you know we aren’t exactly consistent with our publishing so no promises, but time permitting, we’re hoping to get this next entry together before our big day! Until then, thanks for reading and we’ll leave you with a few more photos of our wonderful time in Northland!
