Mushrooms!

Ok, I’m picking up with my blogging this week. Here in New Zealand, the Queen’s Birthday is celebrated on the first Monday in June, so long weekend for us! I’ll get to what we did over the long weekend later this week though. First I want to go back a couple weekends to when my sister and I climbed Mount Victoria in Wellington. It is part of the city’s greenbelt. It is also where the Hobbit’s Hideaway in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was filmed. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the bit right after Frodo and Sam run into Merry and Pippin after they’ve “been into Farmer Maggot’s crop!” Then they roll down that big ol’ hill and a carrot breaks and then Pippin sees mushrooms and then Frodo yells about getting off the road and then they almost get caught by the dark rider and then they go to the Buckleberry Ferry. Back up to the mushrooms. Whenever I see mushrooms in the wild now, I always quote Pippin.

I thought that this would be the MOST appropriate time to quote this line seeing as we were ON the path on which the scene was filmed and there were mushrooms there so of course I got onto the ground.

Here’s a view of where we think that big old log that the hobbits hide behind was. We think that we remember the special features DVD mentioning that the tree was a set piece, and this divot in the ground is the perfect place for it.

I’ll put one more picture of the path below as I sign off from another LOTR-based blog. After we finish up our LOTR adventures in July, I am going to write a blog post on this… phenomenon (?) as I see it.