We certainly didn’t get shorted on our Hobbiton experience last night. It was nearly 10pm by the time that the bus brought us back to the Shire’s Rest, and then Bob still had to drive us all the 30 minutes back to our campground (we did take the slightly-longer but less-hilly/curvy main highway this time;… Read more…

Day 3 On November 1st, 2023, we had booked an Evening Banquet Tour at Hobbiton. This special tour is so in-demand that the first slots available were five months in the future, so five months in the future is what we were forced to book. With that peg planted, we then based our travels in New… Read more…

We’ve moved to four different places over the last eight days, but thanks to two different trains, or simply short hops, we haven’t done a bike ride longer than 15 miles over those eight days. Today’s 42 miles would be nearly twice the 8-day total, and our longest distance since we descended into Christchurch three… Read more…

Day 3 Our original plan for today was to do an unloaded out-and-back ride to a big waterfall, with stops at a natural bridge and a free-access cave along the way. But our rescheduled Blackwater Rafting trip, though late in the day, is probably not late enough for us to comfortably do the ride, and… Read more…

Day 2 Today is our Waitomo Caves main event: Blackwater Rafting! That’s the clever branding invented by some nuts who, a couple decades ago, decided to start taking tourists on trips through the caves where you jump off underground waterfalls and float down a hidden river on an inner tube with a ceiling of glowworms… Read more…

Friday morning traffic on the two highways (SH3 and SH39) through Otorohanga was much busier than we had seen a couple days earlier, proving that the four-day school holiday around Easter turns it into a big travel weekend (the NZ Transport Agency even published traffic-backup predictions for the weekend like it did for the Christmas/New… Read more…