The Zammit and Doubleday whānau of Kerikeri won the best team effort prize for their Taupo Bay Big Top. Photo / Peter de Graaf
2020's Taupō Bay Tractor Spectacular was especially poignant for the winning team who dedicated their entry to a lost friend.
The Routledge and Margrain families, who live in Auckland but spend every summer at Taupo Bay, won the supreme award in Wednesday afternoon's parade in the Far North holiday
spot.
A family friend, who liked to dress up as the Pink Panther, had died of cancer a few months earlier, aged just 43. That made the families' choice of a theme, and the judges' decision, obvious.
The annual tradition, now in its seventh year, attracts dozens of fancifully decorated tractors which parade around the settlement on the second-to-last afternoon of the year.
Taupō Bay residents and holiday-makers are particularly enamoured of their tractors because, with no boat ramp in the area, there's no other way of launching boats and enjoying the sea.
