A circuit

Exercise time again and an opportunity to see more of the countryside.  Well, actually most of it was very familiar.  The route took me from Newbold to Rugby and then to  Aldi at Central Park via the old Central Railway perway.  A diversion was required in order to get back to Waiouru.

‘A’ is our mooring at Newbold.  ‘B’ is the railway crossing. ‘C’ where I flew from Rugby to Brownsover.  OK.  I turned the gps off during this portion, hence the straight line.  ‘D’ is  Aldi.  The green and purple lines are the planned route and the red is the actual route.

I couldn’t find the public footpath from Newbold to Rugby and eventually walked an unofficial parallel route before connecting with the public footpath where is goes under the A4071.  This part of the route looked rather run down.

The route turned parallel to the railway and at one point I became concerned there was no access across the tracks.  However the map was accurate and hidden behind a large shrub I found a tunnel.

I then discovered instead of one tunnel, there were two.  Both rather neglected.  They pass under the active tracks and between them was a disused alignment.

The path joined a dead end lane on the far side of the tunnels.  This lane had a line of vehicles parked on one side.  They also had an abandoned look with many of the tyres only having air at the top.  The remainder of the walk to Rugby and Central Park has been covered in previous posts so I’ll skip to the return from Aldi.  I’d also walked this route last year.  You might imagine my surprise when I walked across the busy A426to find this…

There were no roads or buildings during my previous walk!  Some major earthworks have been going on and instead of a reasonably firm footpath there were acres of soft wet soil (ie, mud).

The choice was to either walk back and around the long way or chance it and attempt a crossing.  I chanced it!

Thick gluteus mud.  The type that likes sticking to itself and eventually you walk with what feels like a bag of cement on each foot.  It probably would have been easier and quicker to go back and take the longer route.  It’s not the worst mud I’ve waded through.  That honour goes to the red stuff in Fiji.