The Hobbiton movie set rests picturesquely in a hilly area of private farmland near the North Island city of Matamata. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves, but I want to add: if you ever visit, try to go on the earliest tour at 9:30 so that you have the Shire all to yourself for the half the tour! Now prepare to drown in a deluge of hobbit hole imagery….

Sidenote: I touched everything in sight. I have tread on the same paths that Peter Jackson himself walked.

Our guide’s father is an excavator for films, and Cameron (our guide) had worked on The Lord of the Rings set back when he was just a kid.

Bag End

The illustrious hole (Hobbit holes are the only illustrious holes) of Samwise Gamgee

We rode a Hobbit seesaw and I befriended a Hobbit cat (if I were an animal I would want to be that cat)

Hark! Hobbit children.

Towards the end of the tour, the humans were taken to the Green Dragon and given complimentary tankards of Hobbit ale and Hobbit seed cakes and biscuits. Mind you, this was around 11 am. But, as our guide so wisely stated, “Every hour in Hobbiton is happy hour…. And I’m happy happy happy.”

In closing, I shall leave you with some Hobbit-related facts stolen from my mother’s Tolkien Trivia book….

• The word “Hobbits” is a form of “Holbytlan,” a word for “hole-dwellers”
• Hobbits don’t wear shoes because their sexy (I added that) feet grow thick, leathery soles and wooly brown hair (speaking of shoes- the guidebook may tell you to wear hiking shoes. I’m telling you, wear whatever shoes you darn well please. Just not heels. That’s would just be silly. I actually saw a girl in heels and I was all, “woman, why you wear heels on a regular day let alone on a walking tour of a Hobbit farm?”
• Hobbits eat six meals a day (basically my behavior this vacation)
• Hobbits invented Pipe-weed smoking
• How golf was invented according to Hobbit lore: During the ancient Battle of the Green Fields, Bullroarer charged the line and decapitated goblin-king Golfimbul. The head sailed one hundred yards before disappearing down a rabbit’s hole. In a single shot, the battle was won and the game of golf invented.