Another Rubbish Day In Paradise.

Howdy,

It's the middle of summer here (Santa wears shorts and sports a full body tan), and my wife wanted to go for a drive to one of the white sand beaches nearby. Dunno if many of you here are familiar with New Zealand so I thought i'd do a photo montage.

We live in a township called Omokoroa which is a rural town about 15 minutes from the outskirt of a city of 150,000 or so (Tauranga). Omokoroa is on a peninsula which juts into a calm-water harbour which is shielded from the open ocean by a big long island. My wife wanted to go to Bowentown, which is one of the white-sand beaches where one end of the island meets the mainland.

Here's our trip on Google Maps.

The view from our front porch. We look across a public reserve and the 15th hole green of a golf course to the beach, beach is about 600ft away but because it's a calm-water tidal harbour there's only about 3ft of sand between the grass and the waterline at high tide.

We stopped off at another part of the harbour on the way north, this is at the Katikati heads, you can see a stretch of Matakana Island (the barrier island) in the distance on the 2nd photo.