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| Long Bay Beach popular with early morning dog walkers |
North Shore Nordic Walkers met at Toroa Street and walked down along Cliff Road, onto the Oneroa Track and down to Long Bay beach. The weather was relatively nice on the beach and we were sheltered; there were lots of dog walkers out and the beach was really quite busy. High tide had left the beach littered with a few shreds of seaweed and lots of broken shell, making it pretty noisy going underfoot along the beach to the North end and by the time we had made it to the end of the beach the weather had really taken a turn for the worse.
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| North end of Long Bay Beach |
It amazes me how quickly the weather in this area can change, the wind picked up and the sky became dark and heavy so we carefully picked our way across the beach and came off to wash down our poles at one of the water fountains set back on the car park by the park entrance.
We put on our tips and I guided the walkers up along Beach Road to the place where the diggers were working earlier in the week, the work along this road has been ongoing for a long while and lots of earth has been moved around to make way for the new development to be built on the hillside at Long Bay; the houses along the side of Beach Road have long enjoyed largely uninterrupted views of the hills for many years and sadly this is shortly to change.
During the week Beach Road access to Long Bay was closed off to traffic and on one of my early morning Nordic Walks I had to take a diversion into Willis Street and then into Long Bay Drive to get down to the beach. The left side of the road at the bottom of Long Bay Drive had also been closed off and a digger was pulling away trees from the left side of Beach Road right outside someone’s property. Thinking that maybe that they were making way for new services I didn’t pay it much attention, until the day after when I drove past and saw what the digger had unearthed. It was yet another World War II concrete pillbox, jutting out stubbornly on the side Beach Road, now that’s not something you see every day on the other side of someone’s garden fence. It must have been there during the building of the property and maybe ‘landscaped’ on completion.
We stopped for a while and had a good look at it, and then we moved further along Beach Road and took a look at the latest development of this new site. The area now has what looks to be a lake and it’s already looking like it’s been there a while, but there is an older property that is now visible since a lot of excavation work has taken out most of the old trees and bush. The property looks like one of the original baches that were built in the area a long time ago, it’s a quaint weatherboard one story property, it seems quite sad and slightly out of place now. |
| World War II Pillbox uncovered on Beach Road, Long Bay |
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| Digger and heavy equipment at Long Bay |
We looked out on the huge amount of land that has been excavated on the shear-key construction to accommodate the 2 hectare stormwater detention pond and wetlands. Some of the ladies reminisced on previous years when Torbay was a lot smaller and it was really a holiday destination for many families, this combined with the new road that will service Okura and Long Bay, Torbay will change dramatically over the next few years.
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| The changing landscape at Long Bay |
As we started walking up the hill back to the cars, the heavens suddenly opened and we got a soaking, so we quickly made our way back to Toroa Street and grabbed our purses and walked back across the road to Torbay shops and ordered coffee at the Baker’s Gallery. It’s little sad really, Torbay is a quiet suburb with local shops, doctors and dairies, I suspect a lot will change over the next few years, this small cheerful little shopping area will perhaps have to change to accommodate more homes and new families. Whatever the changes will bring, I’m sure that we’ll still be down there at the beach regularly striding along with our poles, chatting and enjoying a coffee after our Nordic stroll.
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