After waking up fairly refreshed, we had our breakfast and headed out on the 45 minute drive to Hobbiton. It was easy to find, and the landscape was really in describable, but you could almost tell when you were in "The Shire." Though we saw very little traffic on the road there, when we arrived, the parking lot was crowded and there were plenty of folks milling about between the ticket booth, gift shop, the cafe upstairs, and the lines gathering to hop on the tour buses that were leaving every 15 minutes or so. We met our tour guide, an American who was working throughout New Zealand for the summer named Nathaniel, which was a little disappointing because we were kind of hoping the hear a Kiwi accent for the tour, but Nate was a pretty good guide, a real Hobbit aficionado with some great stories about some of the scenes, and props and secenery and actors and director interaction. Hobbiton itself was adorable, with many more Hobbit doors than are ever seen the in the movie, many in different perspectives to make it look just right depending on who the actor was standing next to them. One of the more interesting stories dealt with a huge tree just above Bag End, which in the book is supposed to be an oak, but what was there in reality was a huge pine. Director Peter Jackson evidently wanted to hire a crew to pick off every pine needle and replace them with fake oak leaves, but was talked out of it due to its sheer impossibility. Instead, they moved the entrance to Bad End off to one side and installed an entire fake oak tree, the only fake foliage in the entire place. When I first saw it, I thought the color was a bit off, but apparently it was exactly the color Jackson wanted. We didn't hear the story about it being fake until after we left the area, and along the path I looked down and saw an oak leaf of the strange color and picked it up. I had already told Hubby I thought the leaves had been painted or something, because it didn't look real, and sure enough, the leaf was plastic! So I knew the truth before the whole story. So now I'm the proud owner of a plastic Hobbit oak leaf! It was an excellent tour, though we were a bit disappointed we weren't allowed to wander on our own, we had to stay with the group, but Nate was pretty good about not rushing anyone. After the 90 minute walking tour, we ended up at the Green Dragon Inn and had our choice of alcohol free ginger beer, 1% Hobbit beer (which apparently they served at Bilbo's 111th birthday party during the filming), and 5% stout. Of course, we had the stout! Then we discovered there was a small counter serving a couple of classic British items, including pork pie by the slice and beef and ale pie in a tart shell, and since Hubby hadn't had a real pork pie in 40 years, he simply had to have some, and it was exactly as he remembered it (something you can't get in the states, at least not that we'd ever found). I had the beef tart, and we washed it all down with the stout in the 15 minutes between the tour's end and the ride back to the parking lot. The weather was perfect, Nate was great, and the entire experience was delightful, all that we had hoped it would be! We had talked about having lunch at the cafe, but they didn't have anything like at the Green Dragon, so we were glad we ate when we did. We hopped back into the campervan (I'm now getting used to shifting and driving on the left), and headed south on some beautiful back roads to the Tongariro National Park. We had no trouble finding the DOC Campground we were looking for, but then we headed into "town" to see where we would be meeting the leader of our next adventure in the morning, and discovered the gas station they were referring to. Not really much there, a Youth Hostel with lots of backpackers, a bar, a cafe, and a very few adventure outfitters. We headed back to camp, which was only about 5-10 minutes away, found ourselves a nice spot, opened up the door, got out our cheap plastic table and chairs, and was soon enjoying our beverage in the great outdoors. It wasn't long before I made dinner, and not much longer after that that we got into bed, after rearranging it to stay warm for the night, quilt on top, dressed in long underwear. I downloaded my pictures of the day (157!) before crawling into bed. We both started to read, and didn't get very far before we both fell asleep, What a great day! Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!
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