So two weekends ago, I had a last minute trip to Hamilton. I wasn’t planning on going at all but I realised I didn’t want to miss out so I joined a few lovely blogging gals for a quick day trip. We went there for brunch which I already posted about so this post will have everything else we got up to during the day and the cool things I saw while we were there.

So on that early Saturday morning, I met up with the other girls: Lena from lena Talks, Laura from Laura Laura blog and Bitch, peas, Georgie of Georgieats and Rhiannon from In Rhi’s Pantry at Cali Press in Parnell, Auckland.

Cali Press is in Gibraltar Street and it has a nice brick wall in front that’s perfect for instagrams. It was our meeting place because they opened that day and we’re doing free smoothie the whole day.

My current favourite photo of myself, taken by Laura was outside Cali Press.

I got the Muscle Beach smoothie. It has vanilla Sky mylk + banana, mango, blueberry, superfood granola and plant protein. I actually enjoyed mine except I thought the banana was too chunky.

Once we got our smoothies, we headed on the road to Hamilton. Our first stop was the Two Birds Eatery for brunch. Check out my separate blog post for that.

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After brunch, our group split up and Georgie and I had a mini tour by the Hamilton bloggers. Thank you to Amber from Quite Good Food, Dane of Baker Gatherer, Kirstie of Class 22 and Louise from Say Cheese Louise for showing us around!

Our first stop was Love Grove Lane. It had really cool murals and set of shops.

We went inside The Flower Crate and I fell in love. This shop is beautiful!

They have fresh flowers and bunch of other plants and gardening stuff. This place is so aesthetically-pleasing.

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At the end of Love Grove Lane is another cool mural where this outfit photo was taken.

We took advantage of this cool wall. The great thing about being with other bloggers is that I have someone that can take nice photos of me/my outfits. It was awesome!

My outfit was top from Cotton On, Jeans from Kmart, sneakers from Rubi shoes and bag was opshopped.

I wish I took a better photo of the wall but there were other people towards our right.

The mural above was on a building beside the park/playground. I think every blank wall in Hamilton East was covered in art which was awesome.

While waiting for the rest of the group, I checked out a few opshops and I got a bunch of clothing. Watch out for my Hamilton opshop haul next because I got great things for ridiculously cheap prices.

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Our last and final stop was at Duck Island Ice Cream.

It’s located in the corner and it’s a pretty shop inside.

The line was out the door though and we heard that the line is usually long. We waiting for quite some time. When we went which was a Saturday and after midday, they were only two people scooping the ice cream and doing the till. If they had more people, it would’ve been a lot better and quicker.

Duck Island Ice Cream is pretty popular and it’s for good reason. They have interesting flavour combinations and I like that you can have ‘1 scoop’ but have two different flavours.

As per my Instagram post above, I got the Salted Coconut & Mango and Churros with dulce de leche. They were good. I think they were worth the wait and pretty good value too.

After eating our ice cream at the park, we headed back to Auckland. We wanted to explore the Hamilton Gardens but we didn’t have enough time and the clouds turned grey. We made the right call because just as we were leaving Hamilton, the rain poured down.

This day was so much fun and I’d love to go back to Hamilton and explore more places. As I mentioned on Instagram, Hamilton gets a pretty bad reputation. People always seem to make fun of this city or crack jokes but I genuinely had an amazing trip. Yes it was short but Hamilton East was so much cooler than I ever expected.

If you know other cool Hamilton spots I need to check out, please let me know!

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