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Places to Visit in New Zealand – Coromandel Peninsula Cruise

Places to Visit in New Zealand

We recently enjoyed a brief road trip around the central part of the North Island of New Zealand. The scenery was spectacular, the food was world class and it was a wonderful way to relax and re-energise. The Coromandel Peninsula is an area of New Zealand we had never visited before and it’s absolutely one of the places to visit in New Zealand.

I puzzled about why, when I was a 19 year old backpacker travelling New Zealand with my friend Suellen, we didn’t go to this area. I soon realised that we’d probably been advised not to go there because we were hitch-hiking (oh yes, those were the days of being 10 feet tall and bullet proof!). It is an area where any lift would have to take you to the next ‘big’ town because there was nothing in between.

Fast forward to now and we relished being in such lush countryside driving through predominantly dairy and fruit farms, observing the bee hives carefully tended on most produce farms, the pigs, ostriches and alpacas. In other parts of the peninsula we drove through lush rain forest and beside stunning coastal scenery, more beautiful than anything I’ve seen anywhere.

Entering a sea caveThe highlight was taking a cruise at Whitianga. Ken from Cathedral Cove Scenic Tours was the perfect host, knowledgeable, fun and aware of each of his clients,  making sure we got the photos we wanted, were warm enough etc…… All the little things that make for an enjoyable tourist experience.

With my professional interest in career change and my personal interest in people’s stories I couldn’t help but ask him how he came to be doing this work.  With delight he told me that he and his wife had always planned to move to this area but a redundancy hastened the process.  Rather than moving five years later, as planned, they made the move to the Coromandel Peninsula and bought the tourist boat business.  He looked at me and said, almost in a boyish way, “This is my work.  This is what I do every day.  How lucky am I!”

He had no idea that my professional life is spent helping people make major career changes, nor did he know what joy those words would give me.  If only everyone could feel that way about their work!

Undeniably, where he works is spectacular.  Enjoy these photos taken on the cruise, which includes Cathedral Cove and other scenery which was featured in movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Cathedral Cove Coromandel Peninsula NZ  Mercury Bay Coromandel Peninsula NZ

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Jenni Proctor

Hi, I'm Jenni Proctor from Boomers Next Step. Remember when the formula for success in life was simply to strive for good marks at school, gain qualifications, get a great job, work hard and save for your retirement? Yes, I believed it too! For years my husband David and I wanted to develop a business that we could operate anywhere in the world, but both of us were educated to be employees.  We had entrepreneurial dreams and ideas, but still had employee mindsets. 14 years ago I took the giant leap!  I left my job in Education to start a business as a Career Counsellor and Coach, helping mature adults transition from one career path to another, and particularly from employment to entrepreneurship.  I had studied long and hard to gain new qualifications but sadly I hadn’t learnt how to market my new business. About 12 years ago we realized that we were not tracking well towards having the sort of retirement we wanted. We’d saved; we’d invested; and like so many other people we’d also lost some money along the way. It didn’t help that my business was not bringing in as much as I had been earning as an employee. Our dreams of extensive travel and helping our family were being replaced by a growing concern that we would outlive our savings. It seemed that a traditional retirement would not allow us to maintain the lifestyle we wanted. I love helping people plan the next phase of their lives, but we realized that was not going to be enough.  We needed a way to create an income stream that would pay for the travel and other lifestyle luxuries we wanted, that would provide mental stimulation, and would interest us both.

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