A long weekend in the Summer, no work or kindy on the Monday... what do you do?? Climb a mountain of course.
Theses photos have been sitting in my draft folder for 3 months now, waiting for me to write about them. On Waitangi day - the 6th of February hubby and I decided we should take the kids on a bush walk. There were so many options to choose from so I visited the Department of Conversation website. The Ruapane lookout looked promising at only 1 hour each way. We expected it would take longer as George was walking but if we started first thing in the morning we would be home in time for lunch. I packed up a morning tea and off we went.
The walk started out fine, with Grace in the Mei Tai on my back and George setting the pace with his Dad in front. But after about 20 minutes into the walk we accounted lots of mud, the track almost looked washed away. The tree roots where exposed and we found that all of us had to climb rather than walk getting very muddy. Hubby and I talked about turning back a few times but decided to keep going thinking the washed out part would only last for a little while. Turned out it was that way until we reached the rocks.
Why we didn't turn back when we reached the first rock face I don't know, with a LOT of help George managed to get to the top with hubby above and me below lifting him. When we reached a 2nd rock face and manged to climb it I asked a couple going down how much further we had to go, only about 10 more minutes they said but they also told us that it only got worse. This was enough for me, I barely made it up the last rock face with Grace on my back, I wasn't going to risk the kids just trying to get to the look out.
George, Grace and I found somewhere to sit and sent hubby off to the top. We were all hungry so I got out the morning tea only to find it was lunch time, we had been climbing for 3 hours and still had to get back down. We made it back to the car 2 hours later.
While it was fun and hard work next time I'll put in a lot more research into choosing what walk to do.
At the start of the walk, both kids ready to go.
View from the picnic area only 5 minutes from the carpark
My feet before we reached the mud.
This is what the walkway looked like for most of the walk.
Lunch on a rock face
The side of the start of one of the rock faces
George taking a rest
Daddy on his way back down after visiting the top without us.
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