Te Araroa Day 26, Hunua to Rangiriri

Starting km: 692
Finishing km: 746
km covered today: 54(!)

After a semi-relaxed departure from Auckland, I started my first full day out of the city keen to make up for the km I hadn't walked while eating, drinking and having a fabulous time in the city with other friends.

I got off to a bit of a slow start, riding down the road on the back of the quad bike with Cora (Benjamin's 70+ year old mom) to gather some roadside grass they'd cut the previous night.
But it made it that much more satisfying to walk that section of shoulder when I reached it after riding back to the turnoff to the farm!

The walk to the town of Mercer was an uneventful, flat meander along roadsides and some raised grassy stopbanks in amongst farm fields. These later were most notable for often being marked with now hardened cowprints in the mud that made them quite tough on the ankles.

Mercer itself wasn't super exciting. A village with a motorway service station and a few houses.  AND a fabulous cheese factory where I bought some nettle Gouda!

After Mercer the track did some weird, seemingly pointlessly wandering up and down hills. Other than the British fortress site from the Land Wars, the main feature was abysmal track marking that continually tried to send you walking into marshes or thick patches of gorse.

This dealt with the afternoon had you following the verge of State Highway 1 then (much more pleasantly) the banks of the Waikato River. (With a brief visit to Meremere, where the weekend drag races were on, in case you missed the sound of cars.)

Some more stopbank walking, then some more along the river and I arrived at my planned campsite. But it was still only 17:45 and Rangiriri was only 15km away, and getting there would mean I'd done my first 50km day.

Sufficie it to say that, aside from the beautiful double rainbow and sunset combo near the end of the final 9km of roadwalking, this wasn't the best idea.

I rolled into Rangiriri (and the campsite in back of the lovely Cathy's café) just after dark with rain just beginning to get hard.

I was so exhausted that I couldn't be bothered to cook. But at least I had some crackers and really yummy cheese to eat in my tent!