Circle Line Rail "Cruise"

Here's a fun fact you may or may not know about me, I love trains, not in a trainspotter kind of way but I do love train journeys.

I wish there were more opportunities to make long train journeys in New Zealand, unfortunately at some point it seems that we decided that train travel wasn't for us and that people should get from A to B using the roads (although planes are now a lot cheaper and Rich and I use these over long car journeys whenever we can!).

However, from time to time we have a chance to take a train ride and an organisation out in Paekakariki offers historic train rides and we finally decided it was time to take a train ride!

We took this train just before Christmas and we had a very early start, leaving our flat before 6am on a Sunday to head out to Paekakariki to catch our train.

As the train journey was a little before Christmas, the train was decorated in Christmas theme and even the cute cafe in the train had some festive treats for sale.

One of the things I like about trains is that you get such a different view to the view you get when traveling in a car and some of the landscape looks so much more impressive! These photos were taken as we traveled through the Manawatu Gorge.

We also stopped at small towns that I would never normally visit - Pahiatua anyone? Population of around 4,000 in case you were wondering.

There were two options of a "final" destination (not really final as we had to travel back to Paekakariki) either a country fair or visiting a winery.

I don't drink, but we still chose the winery, it was the perfect place for a picnic in the vines (other people did actually go to the restaurant though).

It was also the perfect place to get a few photos of the train (and with the train!).

From here we headed back to Wellington, but there was another chance on the way home to stop for photos.

That's a very brief round up of our rail cruise, it was a lot of fun and I'm hoping I can do a few more of these in 2017.