Tuesday 22 December 2015

Road trip – yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A friend recently bought a new car and was keen to do a wee road trip somewhere and I was very keen to go to New Plymouth to see Mt Taranaki, the Pukekura Gardens lit up for Xmas and the brand new Len Lye Gallery, both of which I read about in the Air New Zealand magazine a couple of months ago – so it seemed like the perfect place for a road trip.

Our first stop for coffee was in the Clock World & Longitude Cafe in Ohaupo, which is somewhere just south of Hamilton.  The Clock World shop was awesome with many fabulous clocks but the cafe left a lot to be desired.  The service was incredibly slow, the person behind the counter was kinda rude and prefered to organise her cakes into some sort of order rather than serving us and the coffee wasn’t all that great.

That was our one and only stop on the way to New Plymouth, just as well I’d packed a gift box of Kahlua Chocolates or I may have starved to death. It was a lovely easy drive with lots of great scenery, but the weather wasn’t great and I was a tad disappointed that I couldn’t see THE mountain at all.  I was hoping for better weather the next day so I could see it.

We checked in to the The Devon Hotel which was really lovely and set off in search of a snack to tide us over till dinner.

Second dinner was in the hotel restaurant which was a glorious buffet and it felt like half of the the town also went there for dinner – children and all for a Xmas dinner treat I guess, coz it was packed and people I spoke to all lived in New Plymouth. Anyway the food was great!

After that we set off for Pukekura Park which the TSB Bank turns into a “Festival of Lights” from the 13th of December to the end of January. It was truly spectacular and well worth the drive from Auckland.