Thursday, Feb 11, 2016

I have been through the depths of Mordor and now I have also been to the Shire.

Weather conditions affected my excursion today and required me to switch my anticipated tours. With the change I drove to visit Hobbiton, where I could tour the movie set of the Shire from the movie, “ Lord of the Rings ”.

On my way along the detour to Hobbiton, I stopped at a small cafe for lunch and I had the opportunity to talk to a fellow who was spraying the weeds and I had a short conversation with him regarding New Zealand policies about the use of herbicides.

I had been enjoying the rolling hills in the North Island and I could tell why this area was used for the movie. Just 6 miles north of the set, I saw a similar landscape.

I reached Hobbiton, at 1 pm, 2 hours before my tour would start so I relaxed for a while and waited for the tour to begin. Hobbiton is strictly regulated to control the number of tourists.

The movie set has been maintained since the completion of the films and I found the attention to detail very interesting. I couldn’t capture all of the many ” hobbit ” homes in a single picture.

” Bag End ” had the most detail associated with it.

Just before we completed the tour, we were invited to the ” Green Dragon ” pub, used in the movie to have a drink.

At the completion of the tour, I drove to Cambridge to visit with my brother-in-law’s niece, Petra, her husband Gavin and their family. I was treated to typical New Zealand hospitality. We had a wonderful BBQ dinner, Gavin gave me a tour of a kiwi farm, along with state of the art technology used to grow the kiwi fruit and then we visited until late in the evening.

When I returned back to the motel, I started to prepare for tomorrow’s adventure. Hopefully the weather co-operates this time.