Lord of the Rings journey

On New Years day, the three of us ventured off to Mt. Victoria, which is in Wellington and the site for the hobbits fleeing the Nazgul on the edge of the Shire. While we found a sign, locating the exact spot was somewhat tricky, but I still took lots of pics. Later that day, we sat on the beach a bit and managed to sunburn the crap out of my shoulders just like I always do. I never learn. Yesterday, we created a list of things to hunt down and drove to Upper Hut which is just north or Wellington. First stop, the Hut River which was a site for the River Anduin. They filmed along a large part, so we stopped at one place and took a bunch of pics and I definitely felt like that was a prominent area for Lord of the Rings. However, the whole river is only perhaps a foot deep if that so.......I'm wondering how they managed to get boats to float in it. We met a nice fellow there with a french bulldog and a rotweiler pup that were fun to play around with for a bit. Then it was off to Harcourt Park, which is a local normal park where they filmed lawn and garden areas for Isengard and where the Orcs cut down that massive tree in Isengard. I took pics of an area without realizing I was in the heart of it because it really doesn't look like anything but upon reflection I figured out where the hell I had been. Ha!! Then we went to Kaitoke Regional Park which is deep in the hills of the bush and so lush, here is Rivendell. They had signs all over for it which was funny. The area where they were said to film was beautiful but you couldn't get the right point of view because what they did was build a set of the room Frodo and Bilbo confronted each other in up high above a river so we were in the area that you would see outside their window basically although I photographed where the set had been above the river from a bridge as well. It was so cool!! Nothing like having a stranger walk up to you and ask if Rivendell is nearby and then being able to give directions, hehehhehheehe!! We even drove past where they did Helm's Deep but it's a private quarry so we couldn't go in and it was on the highway so we couldn't really stop. But the vibes were all there...