Day One - Cape Reinga / Te Rerenga Wairua to Twilight Beach
1/177 | 21st November 2020 | 12kms
Noodles for brekky anyone?
We wake half slipped off our sleeping mats feeling nervous and disorderly.
You see, we’ve not yet done an overnight hike as a family. We have no idea what seven days worth of food looks like.
All kinds of things are accidentally packed or have been left behind in Whangārei or Sydney. Fortunately Tam and Marcus are here and can take a box of overflow items away with them.
My (D) vision of epic opening shots - oh the possibilities in this splendid place! Imagine it, us walking out at sunrise and various other never-seen-before shots of trail beginnings.
Sadly, all squashed and I have to swallow my dreams and get on with it.
The tide is coming in and we need to get around the second point before it gets too high for the kids. We can barely lift our packs, of course, ha! Fortunately there are loos here and the nervous poos float away without the need to dig numerous cat holes already.
“We are grinning and jittery and holy shiiiii the day is here!”
Added - 3.6.22 - A year and bit after we finished the trail
Thinking back to that first day on trail, a year and a bit later, my toes and tummy still tingle with the fear and excitement of it all. If you don’t mind a little swearing, we were shit scared!
Well, I was. I’m sure you can imagine the what-ifs crashing in like an annoying toddler who just won’t give up on the but why? What if we couldn’t do it; what if one of the kids gets injured, even worse, what if we didn’t like it out there… Ha!
That first morning trying to pack up was pretty stressful. We hadn’t packed up camp before, all new tricks to learn and I got served my first hard lesson in letting go of any ounce of control. Tom turned out to be an excellent packer - the man is a machine in the mornings which is so very good when I’m a bit of a faff. I get a bit overwhelmed with the mess of it all and find it hard to decide where to start and then my eyes wander and wonder at the delicious light changing in our new surrounds - every morning is so different and splendid… Poor Tom.
It took us 3 hours to pack up - ridiculous!
Any ideas we had of grand beginnings were quickly canned; no sunrise shoot or lighthouse scene, I couldn’t lift my pack off the ground so Tom had to hoist it up for me. We rushed to remove a bunch of stuff that just couldn’t fit in and then rushed some more to make it past the rocky point before high tide came in and halted our passage until much later. Too late to make it to camp before dark. Why are there even deadlines out here in the wild?
“Of course, this was also our first lesson in, shit yeah, we can. ”
Our feet got really sore walking on the sand, you see it’s hard like concrete and quite different from grass and dirt. The last three ks of this 12k day were pure pain and struggle for some of us. We all found it challenging and some of us cried and dragged our throbbing feet and tipped over from the weight of our packs and it all felt too hard.
But then we got to camp and ate dinner and played and explored and talked to the other hikers at camp who were starting Te Araroa that day too. We said out loud our idea to walk the whole country with the kids and the other TA trampers were excited and thought it was neat. That feeling of fitting in was such a relief - who knew we craved social acceptance so much as adults too. Like your first day at a new school, not knowing anyone but then you make a new friend and have someone to be unsure about it all with. Our new friends were a bit nervous and excited too. We had started to find our way out there on trail and there was magic in it.
