We drive to go and see the Green Lake go past it without noticing and travel 5km down the road before noticing, we instead stop to look at another lake of whose name i have no idea. We travel in convoy to Matamata with the weather looking a bit grim, but thankfully when we arrive two hours later it's perfect for visiting Hobbition. We book onto a tour going 1/2 hour later. The trip there takes 20 minutes and we're given background information regarding Matamata which is a bit dull and some information about the film which unfortunately isn't much better. There is one story though of when the New Line cinema executives were looking for a site to build Hobbition and discovered this farm where it was eventually built. They went and knocked on the door of the farmer who was watching rugby with his sons and told them to do whatever they liked as long as they shut the gate after them to stop the sheep getting out. When they returned with the good news of using his land for the film he remembered them by how they interrupted his rugby game. Sounds like a bit of a red neck to me. We get taken to a lookout before the tour and see the whole of the shire so to speak with lovely rolling hills, with you seeing that the film makers made a wise decision. We have the obligatory photo taken in front of 'Welcome to Hobbition'. We move down and our guide takes us around Hobbition. It's a bit run down but you still feel like a school kid running around and i can visualise ho it looked in the film. We have far too many photos taken with us in various poses on the party field and next to the party tree. It's a shame that the actual houses apart from Bilbo's are wooden panels placed into the scenery, with Bilbo's house offering you the opportunity of going inside even though it's really a hole. With the tour over we continue onto Auckland and stop about 35 km away where Russ and Marc leave us to go to the Bay of Islands. Us, Danny and Vicky travel to a place called Pukekoke where we pull up next to some football fields with all manner of games going on waiting for it to disperse so we can settle there for the night.
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