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Martinborough, New Zealand
On the twelfth day of our adventure, we woke up in the morning with the sad prospect that today was our last day in the North Island, as we had a flight to the South Island at 5pm that evening. Wanting to toast goodbye to the gorgeous North, we decided to head to wine country in Wairarapa, situated about an hour east of Wellington. This drive consisted of another pass through the Rimutakas, and since it was such a beautiful day in the mountains, we stepped out of the car at a lookout point and went on a short hike to reach this beautiful vantage point: Before we came to…
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Weta Cave, Wellington, New Zealand
On the day after Christmas, we woke up to the discovery that it was Boxing Day, a term that we Americans only partially recognized as a British holiday of some sort. Our hotel clerk quickly informed us that Boxing Day was a public holiday in New Zealand, where the stores run huge sales and people get out and shop. Wellington, which had been a ghost town the day before, was now a madhouse of people. For those familiar with the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, you will recognize Wellington as the hub of production for the cast and crew in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Wellington is home to the…
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Putangirua Pinnacles, New Zealand
The walking track guide didn’t give much instruction other than “follow the stream,” and since New Zealand is currently in the midst of a super long drought, that was easier said than done. Several times we lost our way and had to double-back on the path to make sure we didn’t get lost in the middle of the mountains.
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Wellington, New Zealand
Wellington is a four-hour drive south of Tongariro National Park, which is where we woke up on Christmas Eve. For most of the drive, we passed through beautiful countryside and farmland, spotting cattle, sheep, goat, alpaca, deer, and horse farms. We popped in at a small café in the tiniest little town you can imagine—“Bulls,” which made every effort possible to make a pun about cattle (“this café is unbelieva-BULL”). After lunch, our car zoomed across several smaller mountainsides and eventually wound its way to the West Coast, where I shouted in glee upon seeing the Tasman Sea, which spans between Western New Zealand and Australia. About an hour from…
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Hobbiton Movie Set, New Zealand
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien So goes the famous first line of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the prequel to his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy that has touched so many of our lives. On the seventh day of our December 2017 honeymoon, Matt and I woke up after a pretty restless night at our Rotorua hotel (super old hotel = super thin walls) and drove an hour north to Matamata. If you look on a map of New Zealand, Matamata rests in farming country, with green, rolling hills that are slightly reminiscent of our home state of Tennessee. Before director Peter Jackson…
