No walking this weekend - weather inclement

Sadly my great plans for Saturday's walk could not come to fruition. I even had good and bad weather plans, but conditions were so dastardly that the bad weather one was still too optimistic.

However on Friday afternoon I did pick up two useful Auckland City walk brochures, pictured below, at the Onehunga Library.

There was quite an impressive range of heritage walks, although I only grabbed the original shoreline one (the black leaflet). The green one covers the Point to Point walkways (we have already done Tahuna Torea), the Coast to Coast, and the Manukau Coastal walkways (including the Blockhouse Bay explorer, Te Ara O Tiriwa, which has also already been completed).

Two things though:

1. Why aren't these resources available, at least for download, on the Auckland City Council website? (Or if they are, why couldn't I find them?)

and

2. Some of these walks are 3 or 4 hours in one direction. It's then necessary to get back to your starting point for your car. But the public transport system isn't up to it, particularly not on a Sunday. Mercifully there is supposed to be a regular bus from Onehunga back to QEII Square for the Coast to Coast. But the Original Shoreline walk looks very interesting, with an excellent guide to the streets and sights in the black pamphlet, yet I'm a bit stumped about how to get back to the start again.

Humph, I'm probably just grumpy because I didn't get to walk yesterday.

Writers' Walks

Googling around (aka procrastinating) found this link to NZ's Writers' Walks and other literary "destinations". The Auckland ones seem to all be on the North Shore.

Could be a useful resource if we run out of volcanoes or walks in the Day Walks of Greater Auckland book, although I don't see that happening anytime soon...

Identification

Found this excellent site, the NZ Birds Gallery, which confirms that the birds photographed at Long Bay last weekend were indeed yellowhammers. A very useful and well laid out site.

In other identification news, the jellyfish spotted at Tauwhitokino Bay on 7th October were featured on the front page of the Herald earlier this week. Massive examples of the Lion's Mane jellyfish have been washing up on Great Barrier Island recently, and there was a picture of a 1m plus monster splashed on the front cover on Wednesday (which you can see to the right).

Although the supersized ones are a cause for concern, it was nice to get confirmation that the jellyfish is in fact supposed to have a blobby purple top and yellow skirts, as we were a bit worried they might have all been sick at Tauwhitokino Bay as they look pretty strange.

North Shore Council walks

Sussing out the Le Roy's Bush walk to do tomorrow with Ferd (weather permitting) I found the North Shore City Council's page on walks and popular parks.

Three volcanoes - walks I prepared earlier

Last year I actually managed to walk up three of Auckland's volcanoes, so I can already tick off:

• Mt Roskill (cannot find out the Maori name) - surprisingly steep and you have to walk through the cows (and their pats) which is quite fun
• Mt Albert (aka Owairaka) - a bit dull, but had a nice picnic at the top
• Pigeon Mountain (aka Ohui-a-rangi) - quite small, I've always wanted to climb this one because of an historic association with OAR YMs which is based at the bottom of the hill.

I've also found a handy map of Auckland's volcanoes on the ARC site (and learnt how to spell volcanoes correctly as a result). Some of those listed are of course craters rather than hills, eg Lake Pupuke. I'm not sure how I'll tackle those as I know you can't walk around all of them due to private property on the lake/basin edges.

the first footprint

The purpose of this blog is to motivate me to complete my goal of walking up every Auckland volcano, as part of my aim to increase my fitness and get to know my own city better. I'm also intending to do many of the other non-volcanic walks Auckland has to offer, especially in the early stages as I build up my poor saggy calf muscles (they really are pitiful).

I'll be recording these walks here, in brief, along with a few photos where I've remembered to take the camera along. The idea is to try to go on a walk each Saturday, as the weather allows. I'm not walking alone - Nickname Pending will hopefully be coming along too most days.

Recommendations for walks are always welcome. Currently I am seeking them out through several methods:

• The book Day Walks of Greater Auckland by Marios Gavalas and Peter Janssen
• The ARC website's page on Walks and tramping
• Where my trusty road-map says the volcanoes are

I'm not expecting a big readership of this blog, it's mostly for self-motivation, but if you do drop in and feel inclined to share please feel free to do so via the comments function (after each post), or send me an email via spanblather@gmail.com.

Happy reading to you and happy walking to me!
Span