Woodhill Diary

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Wednesday 27 December 2006

Lacking exercise, and the time to travel far, I headed down to Rimmers Beach this morning for a walk with Alice. Last time down here I moaned like hell about the potholed condition of the last bit of gravel road and even got as far as emailing a photo to the Rodney Council. To my delight, that has been fixed. No more potholes.

However, the gravel road through the rest of the forest as far as Inland Rd is still something of a mission. mainly, I suspect, because the people who use it most frequently have not been brought up on gravel roads, and travel far too fast for the conditions.

If you travel too fast on gravel roads, you create corrugations. On quiet country roads used mainly by residents, you rarely see corrugations. Typically you have three fairly smooth tyre tracks, the middle one shared, and if you meet someone you pull over to let each other past. Every now and again a grader redistributes some of the loose gravel from the sides back to the middle.

But this is a well and truly corrugated road, and without shaking the van to pieces it is not feasible to travel; much over 35kph.

I snatch a couple of photos on the track from the parking area to the beach. Muehlenbeckia is in flower.

(The flowers are actually about 7mm across)

and a little further on, tauhinu is flowering. Most reference books list this as Cassinia leptophylla but it has in recent years been re-classified as Ozothamnus leptophyllus.

These too are somewhat magnified.

The tide is low, it's a wide open beach and Alice has a ball. Dogs and teenagers in cars seem to share a need to travel in circles on this beach. We continue until Alice begins to slow down, then head back to the van.