Golden Bay #3

After we come down off the hill and come around that final sharp horse shoe bend at the bottom of the hill, you know the one where you change down for the second time going up the uphill on the Takaka side, followed by e few more bends with the bank on your left and the creak on your right, then we are out on to the straight and there on the left is first big paddock, then the big car park with the kids' play ground at the back of it, and there are the fuel pumps standing there on their own, then the pub itself. It is followed by the woolshed and cattle/sheep yards, all on the left, as you make the big sweep right hand bent with the turn off to the left that leads of up to the Cobb valley and the Dam on the left, as we run on to the straight that takes you into Upper Takaka with the NZED sub station on your right and a few minutes later the school on your left by the big tree, then the Tennis court, the bus shed.

Then the road rising up with a few small bents and onto another straight down towards a sweep left hand bent, where my mother and father used to live in the house on the right, many years before I was born, but I think my sister may have been born there. The start of the bent, which is shaded by big trees on the left, and the hill on the right, which always made it interesting in the winter for driving, as ice settled there and out the other side and on the right, was old Steve Hearts place and the piggery on over the bridge there, where Sowmen used to live out n the left and then there was a saw mill round to the right. We went down a bit of a straight then around to left. Just here there was a road/track on the left, easily missed, that runs up through the scrub; this is where some hippies had grown some happy backy plants and had them hanging in buckets up in the pine trees, that grow there, which the local copper thought quite funny at their sneakiness of hiding it. This part of the road had a lot of scrub on either side of it, then there was a bit of hump and hollow road then, then a bit of a hill, in which you went down, from memory had silver birch trees, growing on the left hand side, up on the bank, as the road swung around to the left and followed the bank around, where there was a big stand of pine trees, where Bill and Coral Gilbert lived.

To be continued.