A warm and sunny early-autumn afternoon brought 27 people out to explore a perennial Club favourite, the Long Bay Regional Park. The tramp was originally to have been to Arkles Bay and Weiti, hence the name of the trip, but the leaders had visited the area the previous weekend and found the intended trip would have been mainly road-bashing. The last time the Club had visited Long Bay was in July 1999. We set out from the carpark beside the Long Bay Cafe shortly after 2pm and headed northwards to the start of the new nature trail just below the Vaughan Homestead. This went into a patch of native bush, climbing gradually. Once out of the bush, we took a turning right into a mown track leading up to the broad hilltops of the Long Bay reserve. There were views out to the coast and the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, with the Coromandel Peninsula in the distance.

A walk across the paddocks brought us onto the Clifftop Track, which we followed down to Granny’s Bay. From there was another new track that went up the valley to the hilltops further along, and from there we cut across and down to the end of the Clifftop Track on the foreshore of the Okura River. We could look across to Dacre Cottage and the Okura Walkway area, where the Club did its end-of-year barbecue tramp just over three months before. We had our refreshment stop on the foreshore before going up along the Clifftop Track back towards Long Bay, a very pleasant walk in the late afternoon sun. The track carried on past the birthday-suit Pohutukawa Bay and up and over to Granny’s Bay, where Myra was waiting for us. She did not feel like doing the whole tramp, and had been enjoying a lazy afternoon on the beach. From there we walked back along the beach to the Long Bay Cafe carpark, finishing just before 5pm. Unfortunately the cafe closed at 3pm, so we had to do with the Long Bay shops for our mandatory ice-cream stop. COST: $2 travel from The Bracken.