Jenny and I recently had the great opportunity to travel to New Zealand, and now you have the great opportunity to read about our adventures in these articles! Catch up on the first article here, and check out the giveaway event going on! There are a bunch of ways (I counted 17) to win some cool swag, merch, and stuff from Norseman Creative, so give it a look and jump on your chance to win. If you’re in the neighborhood, I’ll be at a book signing in Alexandria Minnesota on 25 May, 2024.
Our second day in New Zealand started a touch later in the morning than the first. The sun had just started to paint the Kiwi sky when we dragged our luggage out of our hotel room and to our rented Kia SUV. Leaving Auckland, we drove South this time, to arguably the most famous of New Zealand’s many Lord of The Rings themed attractions, the Hobbiton movie set.
When Jenny and I move or travel to a new place, we like to watch famous movies and/or TV shows that are set in or filmed in that location. When we moved from Monterey, California to Boston, Massachusetts, we watched the entirety of Cheers. When we found out we were to be stationed in Hawai’i, we watched all of the Hawaii Five-0 reboot series. Shortly after buying our tickets, we bestowed upon New Zealand the same honor by watching all of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies. The extended editions. I am not a huge Lord of the Rings nerd, but those movies really got me hyped to visit New Zealand, especially Hobbiton.
The ranch where the Hobbiton set was built is still an active beef and sheep ranch, containing some of the most picturesque rolling hills I have ever seen. We still had a few minutes before our scheduled tour, so our first stop was the Hobbiton gift shop and cafe to get a cup of coffee and a pastry to split. After that it was time to load up the bus and head to the bus for a short ride to the Hobbiton set.
From the moment we stepped out of the bus, the cool air felt and tasted fresher than whatever air I had been breathing my whole life. A faint scent of woodsmoke from a smoker or cooking fire wafted out of the shire, over the hills, through my nose, and directly into my emotions. We took a short walk on the road to the Shire from the bus stop to the Hobbiton set, and when we strode through the trees, it was truly like walking into one of the Lord of the Rings movies.
The tour was awesome, we learned that Hobbiton had been built twice. The set was built first for the Lord of the Rings movies, partially torn down, and then rebuilt for the Hobbit prequel movies, at which point Peter Jackson and the family that owned the ranch realized it would be a destination tourist attraction. Our tour guide walked us through the different easter eggs scattered around Hobbiton, like where to find the “Town Drunk’s” Hobbit hole, or which trees looked super real but were actually fake. It was interesting to learn that something like 90-95% of the fruits and vegetables in the gardens were real, painstakingly cultivated by a team of gardeners.
Many of the Hobbit holes are just facades built into the hills, but a few of them open up into a sort of closet-sized storage facility, and a few more contain wood burning stoves and smokers that put off the sweet smell of woodsmoke that I smelled right when we got off the bus. We did get to see Bag-End, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ house from the books and movies, as well as Samwise Gamgee’s house and a couple other characters from the series. Our penultimate stop took us to a pair of Hobbit Holes that were fully furnished that we got to walk around in.
The house looked small on the outside, just like the rest of the Hobbit Holes, but inside was actually pretty spacious and roomy. The tour guide told us it was scaled to roughly 90% human height, which means its good enough for everyone but the tallest 10% of the world. We got to mess around with a few of the props, I put quill to parchment and wrote the next chapter of my manifesto, and wander around the house looking at how Hobbits live. Jenny remarked that she wouldn’t mind having a house like it, and neither would I, provided it came with the incredible view of rolling hills, the wisping scent of cooking fires, the simple life of a Hobbit, and was walking distance from a delightful tavern.
Our last stop on the tour was across a stone arch bridge to the Green Dragon Tavern. The Green Dragon features heavily in Hobbiton life, particularly in the books, and was burned down in a dream sequence in the movies. In real life fantasy world, the Green Dragon serves a couple of beers and a ginger beer that comes with the tour, and I very much enjoyed drinking their dark stout beer while sitting by the fireplace inside and wishing I lived in a cozy, quaint hole in the ground instead of in a dirty city.
Our time at the shire grew to a close sooner than I wanted it to, but not without one last stop at the gift shop to buy a copy of the Silmarillion and a pair of “Gondorian” fingerless gloves. Then it was time to point our little Kia South yet again, and steam to our lodging for the night. First, we made time to stop at a hot springs and soak for a little bit, then to see a couple rivers and bridges.
As we drove through New Zealand’s North Island, Jenny and I could really see why Peter Jackson chose to film his movies there. The scenery was amazing, the right blend of rugged, pristine, and accessible. I remarked that if I was a big time movie director, I would only film movies in New Zealand. The landscape had a huge effect on both Jenny and I, more positive than any I can remember. Driving through the small Kiwi towns, I started realizing I was missing small, rural town living more than I realized.
Our drive South ended for the night at a small campsite offering “Camper Pods,” basically one-room tiny shacks that had a bed and not much else in them. The campsite owner came to greet us as we were getting settled in. She apologized that we were too late for her to open the diner and make us dinner, at which point Jenny and I realized how incredibly hungry we were. Neither of us had eaten since the shared pastry at the Hobbiton cafe, and the mere mention of dinner triggered our stomachs to protest their emptiness.
Before we could go off in search of dinner, we had to look around the campsite. For me, the campsite exploration was geared towards finding the bathroom. On my excursion to find the bathroom, which would have been easier had I bothered to check the map of the compound hanging on our Camper Pod’s wall, I discovered a pen holding a couple Alpacas, a playground, and eventually the bathroom. Jenny’s exploration of the campground yielded what she called a “very pretty horse.” The pony did have really fabulous hair.
Since the camp diner was closed, Jenny and I looked for someplace local to eat dinner. This is where we learned first hand that “open late” in New Zealand means 7pm, and since it was nearing 8pm, we had missed our opportunity at every restaurant for a fifty kilometer radius was closed (a kilometer is about ten football fields long, so this was 500 football fields in any direction!), except one restaurant. The most reliable of global hegemons, the Red and Yellow, Ronnie McDee’s house, was still open at this late hour. With no other option, we drove thirty minutes back the way we came to get ourselves the best Macca’s New Zealand has to offer.
It was then time for bed on our last night on New Zealand’s North Island. The next morning would be an extremely early one, we had a boat to catch.
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