Long Beach & Purakanui

On Saturday two weeks ago we went on an outing to Long Beach to pick up a drafting table for Dave that we saw in the classified ads. Long Beach is only about 12 miles northeast of Dunedin, but took 45 minutes to get there because of the windy road. Beautiful views over the Harbor and then farmland. Long Beach turned out to be a strip of houses along a beach about a mile and a half long with a stream flowing into it. The shelducks in the first photo were in that stream. The gulls in the second photo are red-billed gulls, which are very common here. Both their legs and their bills are red. The weather that Saturday was lovely, around 60 degrees. (Remember this is the equivalent of early March.) By Monday it was 71 degrees, and then on Tuesday it snowed. I have never lived in a climate with rapid weather changes like this one.

Just over the headland from Long Beach is a very small town called Purakanui. It is a cluster of houses on a steep hill above a bay. In the first photo of Purakanui, the white dots on the hill above the houses are sheep. If you double-click on the picture it will show in a larger format and you can see the sheep!