Taylor's Mistake & Mt Richardson
Taylor's Mistake
Saturday
This weekend marks our first time exploring a little further out from Christchurch city. We've spent previous weekends doing a bit of local exploring on our bicycles, but it was about time we went out to see what else Canterbury has to offer. On Saturday afternoon I decided I wanted to see the ocean. We'd tried on a previous occasion, but ended up in New Brighton, a disappointingly run-down looking suburb with a windswept beach and a very large, long and blustery concrete pier (which was admittedly fairly interesting).
We had a quick look on Google Maps and found Sumner a tad further south. Taylor's Mistake (Maori: Te Onepoto) is a bay on the far side of Sumner, which turned out to be the type of pleasant seaside suburb we were expecting from New Brighton. Taylor's Mistake is home to the very reasonably-sized Godly Head Park, which is circled by walking tracks and BMX tracks.
One of the many crumbled rocks at Taylor's Mistake
It was lovely and warm, and a great way to wind down after spending most of the previous week inside working on an assessment task for uni.
Sunday
On Sunday we organised with a few of James' workmates to check out Mount Richardson with a casual 6 hour hike. The track was an hour's drive northeast of Christchurch past farmland and into the hills. The loop track we took began at 500m elevation and peaked at 1080m elevation, before returning back to the beginning. This meant that although it was quite a warm, sunny day, it was quite cold at the peak, and there were numerous sections of mud, slush, snow and ice. James and I aren't exactly kitted out for big hikes, so we showed up in our runners, while our other three companions wore hiking boots... All things considered, I think we did reasonably well.
One of the first (of many) snowy sections
James made a friend. Literally.
I probably started complaining around the second hour... but as the only female of the group I felt it necessary not to enforce stereotypes, and therefore stifled the majority (not all) of my complaints. The first third of the trail was entirely uphill, which was quite gruelling, followed by a small amount of flat-ish walking, with the majority of the remaining two-thirds downhill, which becomes exhausting eventually, too.