Luncheon In Hobbiton – Touring Hobbiton

Very image heavy, even by my admittedly low standards; You’ve been warned

I’m breaking this up into multiple posts, because there are a lot of pictures.

For a Too Long: Didn’t Read summary?

Hobbiton was awesome. I’d say it was like being there, except that

1. It’s not a real place, so that’s a weird thing to say
2. To the extent that it is a real place, this is that real place

I took the tour from Rotorua to Auckland, which involves having my bags shift between buses at Hobbiton, as most of the folks go back to where they started. I’d been a bit concerned about how that’d work, but it turns out that Intercity had a system for that, & Hana the Rotorua driver did the handover to Rachel the Auckland driver, so my bags were moved across about five minutes after we got to the site.

Slightly disappointed that they didn’t go with a riff on “No admittance except on Hobbiton business” for this one.

Most of my pictures are going to have people from the tour group in them; It’s just the nature of the thing.

Something I didn’t know about the Hobbiton set is that they had two different sizes of hobbit hole, one for making a regular size person look hobbit sized, and one to make them look regular sized, so depending on which way the camera is pointing, …

This one was about as deep as a garden shed, so you can pose in it, but not much more?A

Also, that image looks like an album cover.

There was a lineup to have photos taken by Sam the tour guide.

The view from the village green, where the birthday party happens, is fun, because you’ve got details in all directions.

And it did make me imagine a campground of this design, if the hobbit holes were habitable & used as cabins or chalets. It’d be wildly expensive to build, and maybe not the sort of place that people stay at for more than a night?

The next bit of the tour was inside one of the two kitted-out burrows, covered in the next.