A day around Cook's Beach

Today we decided to drive over to Cook's Beach instead of taking the ferry. The drive is about 35 minutes but then we have our own car and don't have to have someone come get us. We first went to the Higgins so we could find out where a less active woman lives somewhere by them. They told us when we got there that they were taking us out to eat at Hot Water Beach. It didn't take much arm-twisting to get us to go. Hot Water Beach is about 10 miles from there and is the most interesting place. Close to the ocean water is about a half mile of sandy beach where people take shovels and dig themselves sand pools. Then water comes up in the pools that is warm, or hot, or cool, depending on how close you've managed to get to the hot water that bubbles up from the ground. It's the oddest thing and totally free! Anyone who comes to visit us will have to get dragged there! After eating at the cutest little restaurant, we stopped at an artist gallery just down the road. We then went to another place we need to explore called Cathedral Cove. It's a natural arch that you can hike down to. We only stopped at the lookout from directly above so you can't actually see the arch. But I did take a panorama of the lookout:

Hot Water beach is to the right, Cook's Beach is to the left and Cathedral Cove is right under this lookout. When Captain Cook first came to New Zealand in the mid 1700's, he landed at Lonely Beach. Because of his exploits in New Zealand, many places have the name of "Cook". Here's another picture of the actual beach at Cook's beach:

The tiny beach in the bottom middle of the pic is Lonely Beach. While we were at the overlook, we could only see about 5 people out on the 3 mile stretch of Cook's Beach. The water was pristine. Afterwards we went back to the Higgin's house to go over the Branch list. The list is a huge mess with about half the people on there being unheard of to anybody. However, we also have a lot of the less-actives we want to try to meet. When we go to stake conference in Hamilton this weekend, we plan to get a more up-to-date list. After we did all the sightseeing and got through the branch list, we drove by the sister's home we had gone over to see but she wasn't home. So maybe tomorrow.
Kia Ora, Elder and Sister O'Neal