The End of the Line (1/3/2017)﻿

Rain! We had hoped to kayak, but rain ruled the morning. Staying near the Golden Bay, we had a lot of options for activities… all of which were outdoors. So we decided to tough it out and head to Farewell Spit, a piece of land that juts into the ocean.

By the time we starting walking out on the Spit, the rain had become a drizzle. We had stopped at the visitor center, but they had no maps to give us. We figured that since the Spit was so thin, and that you needed a permit to go very far, we could wing it.

There were tons of shells on the beach. Most of them were broken, but we still found plenty to collect.

We turned off the beach and onto a road. We figured we were headed…. somewhere inland, and hopefully we could make a loop out of it. The forest was full of thin, gnarled trees. They soon cleared to reveal grassy hills…

And the other side of the Spit: a second beach!!

That was, by far, the shortest walk from shore to shore I have ever done. I suppose it’s probably the only such walk I have ever done. At this point we wondered if we could turn our tramp into a loop. We weren’t sure: we knew what direction to start up this new beach, but there was no guarantee we could find another path across the land. We decided to retrace our steps. Along the way we ran into a surprise.

A quail family! How incredibly adorable! The little chicks, quaillings perhaps, were tiny. As we walked by on the road, the parents jumped up onto the ledge by the road to get away but most of the quallings could not scramble up that far. They ran about as we apologetically passed them.