Our world tour Part 1

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16 October 2016

Again a day without green light from the Aussies.

We have decided to make our way back to Auckland and did something that I would have thought to be impossible in my lifetime. We visited Hobbiton, yes the place where the outdoor parts of "The Hobbit", "Lord of the rings",etc. were filmed. I have never seen a Hobbit movie, nor have I read the Tolkien books, but what we saw today definitely encouraged us to see at least one movie, Margarita did read "The Hobbit", many years ago,to help Alex in school,with a bookreport. The level of detail is incredible and the overall scenary really something special.

I thought that people who generally visited these sites must be "aficionados" and probably nerds. Nevertheless seeing the visitors from all over the world, I am probably wrong.

Now we are staying in Hamilton, one of the six largest cities in New Zealand, with 150.000 inhabitants. Nice place with a variety in restaurants and in people than what we have seen the last number of days. We will stay here for 2 nights and then return to Auckland and make final decisions on how to deal with the visa and travel arrangements.

To help things along, we went to mass in the cathedral The Blessed Virgin Mary.

The night ended with an interesting note: parking downtown Hamilton is not easy and we found a spot after some circling around. The parking place we found was, as most all others in New Zealand, tight. Coming back from dinner, we found a small piece of paper on the window of our car. Initially I thought we had been given a parking ticket, but instead of a ticket, it was the attached note from a disgruntled fellow parker.

The note really made my day!

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Photos

IMG_2113
Hobbiton.