In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…

February 3

Charlotte:

Today was the day that we went to Hobbiton! We booked a tour to go there. Mom has been very excited about this. To get ready for visiting here, we have been listening to The Hobbit audiobook. it is good so far (we’re not quite done it yet).

For our tour, we got on a bus to go the short distance into the actual Hobbiton area. It was so really cute to see lots of little Hobbit holes. There are about 80 holes!

We walked along a trail with a guide who told us some trivia from the movie and filming. For example, the big tree above Bilbo ‘s house is fake and there are 200 000 handmade leaves attached to it. One week before filming started, the director decided the leaves weren’t the right shade of green, so 40 people had to come and hand paint all of them a different green.

Another thing we learned is that Peter Jackson, the director, first made Hobbiton out of fake materials to film The Lord of the Rings movies. Then they took it all down and left the farm. Later on, to make the Hobbit movies, he decided to redo Hobbiton out of real building materials, so that it could be permanent.

We saw one hole that we could enter. It was not that exciting – it only had a mat inside, and I was hoping it would be furnished with miniature furniture. The insides of the holes were filmed in a studio instead. The outside of all of them were adorable.

We saw the main Hobbit hole there where Bilbo lived. It was the biggest Hobbit hole there. It had a big circle green door that had a gold doorknob in the middle.

At the end of the tour, we also went to a restaurant called The Green Dragon Inn where I got non alcoholic ginger beer while Mom got cider and Dad got regular beer and we got a scone and a meat pie to share. Then after that we took a bus back to our campervan.

Sam:

After the tour we drove to a nearby town named Hamilton because dad had found a pub to watch the Superbowl so we got some curly fries and we were in for the “long run.”

Once the San Francisco 49ers sadly lost the big game, we headed to a park closer to Auckland called Te Kauwhata Domain. Tonight is the last night in our campervan. We’ve actually had a lot of fun in our “tiny house” and we’ll all miss it.