Day 3 in New Zealand

We headed out for a three day trip up to Pahia in the Bay of Islands and Whangarei. We were hoping the spend the first night in Pahia but everything was full so we stayed in Whangarei all three nights. On our way up we decided to stop at a beach for lunch but couldn't find anything nice on the highway. We continued north until we saw some signs for beaches and randomly followed them. You can see from the GPS track below that the beach we eventually found (Buckleton) was quite some distance away from the main route.
The image above was created using the GPS logs for the day and a program called DG Terrain Viewer (GDTV) with terrain maps I downloaded from NASA. You can see where we started at the bottom (South), the beach we found way off to the East, Pahia in the North and the hotel in Whangarei.

This is the parking lot (road?) at Buckleton beach. Everyone in New Zealand seems to drive anywhere they want. If the road ends you just keep going on the grass - so I did. In fact, those houses behind our van have driveways that back onto the grassy area.

Above is a picture of Buckleton beach. In the sand you can just make out the sand structure that Matthew and I made. We left sand castles at every beach we visited.

Matthew climbing around in the Whangarei Town Basin, a nice little area near the marina with shops and restaurants.