Blog Posts

Exploring Piha and Karekare: A Day Trip from Auckland

While in the Auckland area, there were a few things/places we wanted to check out. One of those was Piha, which is west of the city, on the coast. Piha is a small beach town around 40 minutes drive from Auckland depending on where in Auckland you are coming from. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any (free)…
Sunrise at Hot Water Beach: Our Memorable Experience

Hot water beach, located on the eastern coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, has been a frequent stop for us. This visit marks the third time we have gone there and tried our luck at digging for hot water. The first visit, which we didn’t really tell many people about, was a total failure. We came…
Exploring Castle Point: Hidden Gems of New Zealand

After Shelby and Logan headed off to explore the South Island, Eric and I had a little over a week to kill before we flew out of the country for a short trip to Fiji. We decided to keep exploring areas we hadn’t seen yet and come up the eastern side of the North Island.…
Why You Need a White Water Rafting Experience in New Zealand

While my sister and her fiancé (Shelby and Logan) were in town, we had a pretty loose itinerary, mostly just having a plan for where we wanted to end up each night. They were staying in Airbnb’s (which we joined in on a couple to spend some more time with them), so the destinations were…
Top Hiking Trails in Karangahake Gorge

After we finished up with Taranaki, we had about four days to kill before needing to be back in Auckland to pick up Taylor’s sister, Shelby, and her fiancé, Logan. We really didn’t want to spend these days just waiting around in Auckland, so we looked for other places we could check out along the…
Exploring Taranaki: Adventures in Egmont National Park

On our way back up to Auckland we made a stop to see Taranaki, which we knew very little about other than it was a big old volcano. Taranaki is actually an entire region in the North Island of New Zealand, but what we were more interested in was the volcano itself, Mount Taranaki, or…