Waiheke Island

Two weekends ago, we rented bikes and took the ferry over to Waiheke Island. This island is about a 35 minute ferry ride from downtown Auckland. It's about 19km long and full of affluent Aucklanders with amazing beach-front properties who commute into the city for work (or just don't work). Waiheke has some of the nicest beaches in the area, but the real draw is the wine. There are 19 wineries on the island, and we've made it our goal to visit all of them during our time in Auckland. We planned to knock off several of them on our recent trip, and had grand aspirations of potentially making it around a 50km route and hitting 7 or 8 wineries. However, as we soon learned, Waiheke is VERY hilly, and also, this tends to happen:

Ultimately, we ended up doing about half the loop that we had intended and managed to visit 4 different wineries and 2 beaches.

Our first stop was Palm Beach for a quick swim.

There were lots of little trails all around the island that would be great to check out while on foot.

Boathouse and Pohutakawa tree...typical NZ.

Ready to coast down to beach #2, Onetangi.

But we happened to run into our first winery before we made it out to the beach. We had a really great tasting here and would definitely go back. Plus, we loved the name.

Casita Miro was our second winery. This place had a lovely ambiance and Spanish decor. We didn't eat here, but the food looked to be reasonably priced.

A bike on the driveway. Typical Spain.

Finally made it to Onetangi beach for a swim.

Our third winery, Stony Ridge. We each grabbed a glass of wine here and sat out in their olive grove to drink it. They also have a massive patio that looks out over the hills, called the yoga deck. It felt like it would be fantastic to do yoga on.

We were getting pretty tired by this point, but made a little photo stop at Surfdale beach.

And finally, a stop off at our fourth winery, Cable Bay. A pretty lovely view, you can just make out Auckland in the background.

We then headed back to the ferry terminal to wait for our boat. While waiting, we debated for a while about how people get to shore from their sailboats (this was deemed a fair topic of discussion, as Calgary is landlocked).

Justin felt the need to smash some shellfish.

And we caught a pretty nice sunset on our ferry ride back into Auckland.

4 wineries down, 15 to go. Looks like we have a few more trips to Waiheke in our future.