Our next foray out from the Taupo house was again to the west coast of the North Island. We planned to spend two full days near New Plymouth, which necessitated a 3-night stay in Stratford (just south of New Plymouth). Stratford is an interesting town, which pays homage to Shakespeare. Most of the roads are named for characters or plays (can you believe they didn't have Romeo and Juliet streets intersect?) and the town's theatre is supposedly where the the first "talkie" was shown in NZ. Stratford is home to New Zealand's only working glockenspiel clock tower, but we didn't have a chance to confirm that it did display scenes from Romeo and Juliet.
Mount Taranaki in the Egmont National Park dominates the landscape on the coast near New Plymouth. It's more than 2500 meters tall and nearly circularly (is that a word?) symmetric. We made a couple of trips up the mountain, first to the east side lookout and then to Dawson's Falls on the southeast side. It was a cloudy cool day (we had our fleece jackets on under our windbreakers that day!) when we went to the lookout, but we still had a great view of the surrounding countryside – we managed to pick out the town of Stratford although we couldn't focus on our hotel. We made the trip to Dawson's Falls in sunshine and the temps were about 4°C warmer. We started at the visitor centre, then walked down to the power station. This is the oldest station in New Zealand, operating continuously since 1935 using water from the Kapuni Stream (http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/historic/by-region/taranaki/dawson-falls-power-station). From the station, we walked down to the lookout so we could see the 18-metre high falls. We took a bit longer than the posted time, but did manage to negotiate the steps down to the lookout and then back up the road to the visitor centre.
