Cycle: 93km

We left pretty early as we had quite a long day ahead of us and it looked as though it would be fairly bumpy. The junction out of town had two state highways and a railway crossing to negotiate - very exciting! The highlight of the day we hoped would be our first view of Mount Taranaki, a huge volcano forming a bite of the west coast and our main reason for cycling up the west coast to Auckland. There was patchy cloud but we climbed up steeply out of Wanganui and maybe 15km out of town we spotted the very top of the volcano sitting above the cloud! It looked very surreal and soon disappeared from view altogether as the cloud closed in.

On the way we stopped at a picnic area for a snack and were entertained by chickens and cockerels and then at the midway point, Waverley for a molten cheese toasty. The highlight on the way to Hawera was the dairy on the outskirts of town (the largest singe site something or other in the southern hemisphere) that had a fine, giant fibreglass cow at its gateway. Hawera was not touristy at all (no campsites or backpackers to be found) so we decided to go for the motel option again. A very helpful lady at the i-site sorted us out with accommodation at the mock Tudor Lodge Motel. We called into the supermarche enroute and stayed in our nice room all night watching the Discovery Channel!