April 4, WONDERFUL WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND!

randolf50
Apr 4, 2023
2 min read

We will spend the day in Wellington which is the capital of the Country of New Zealand. Wellington is the second largest city in the country, and it is truly a metropolitan city with skyscrapers, the Parliament House which they affectionately call the Beehive because of its distinctive shape and loads of trendy restaurants down by the water. Here is a picture of the Parliament House and the downtown area. Our hotel is located a block away from the Parliament House.

Our main scheduled activity for today is a tour of several of the filming locations for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Hobbit. This is the main reason that we included New Zealand in our itinerary. My husband’s fascination and love of the J.R.R. Tolkein story preexisted our relationship. In fact, I was so inspired by his love for these tales that I presented him with a leather-bound limited edition set of the Simirillion and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy as my wedding gift to him. He still has the set of books and has maintained them well. So today is really an opportunity for him to be in the presence of where the movies actually took place. He is ecstatic about this part of the day. Regrettably, we are not allowed to film in most of the WETA studios, so we don't have pictures of the various costume, make-up, and armorer shops we saw demonstrated. Here are some photos of the experience, which we were allowed to take.

After the Lord of the Rings/WETA Studios tour, we continued our tour of the Wellington area principally in the Miramar peninsula. Here are some of the photos of that part of the city.

After the tour, we returned to our hotel room, then immediately walked to the wharf area to get some lunch. The restaurant we ate at was the Dockside. Then we wandered around the downtown area, doing a little shopping and eventually returning to the room for the rest of the afternoon.