Matapouri - I mean, Goat Island

We've been dying to get out of Auckland into the wild, beautiful, back country of NZ - spend a couple nights in a cabin, explore the area on some hikeletts, enjoy a little roadtrip.  But, we never plan ahead for going out of town over Christmas holiday.  We just leave it to the last minute which usually means we don't go on a roadtrip over the Christmas holiday b/c, since it's high season here, everything is expensive and booked up (we may not attempt to plan over Christmas holiday subconsciously on purpose because of reason number 1).  But we're still going to get out of town - today we took a daytrip up to Goat Island (~2hrs), which is renown as a dive/snorkeling destination due to great visibility and lots of fish.  We originally planned for a further north destination, Matapouri, but the traffic was totally unbelievable!  We sat still on the highway at least 3 times until we modified our plans and did a U turn.  One of the problems w/ the highway system is that you go from 4 to 2 lanes (total) when you go through these little towns and there are stoplights.  On the highway.  This may have worked fine when the population of NZ was ~1mill, but, we're up to 4mill right now and this system is not so good.  There's lots of construction going on so I guess someone else is aware that this is a problem.   Here are the pics: Babies in the car (notice the lack of motion in these pics - that's because we're on the highway).

At the beach:

In retrospect, I guess we could have taken some pictures of the beach or sea or Goat Island, but we were focused on the most beautiful things at the beach.