An Expected Journey

Man, I've been itching to get to this post!  When we were planning out trip to Australia this year, we knew we had to take the chance to pop over to New Zealand, for no other reason than to visit some of the locations seen in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.  Sure, the country is beautiful, I found cool toys like the Darkness Warriors, and the Waitomo Glowworm Caves were amazing, but it's the whole Middle Earth thing that really did it for me.

We were able to visit NZ for a week, so we didn't have time to see all the stuff we would have wanted to see, but we visited Hobbiton, it was fantastic, and I'm going to show off my pics here.  I'll also pepper it with some Hobbit figures, because this is a toy blog after all.

Right off the bat, this is the kind of stuff that greets you when you arrive at the airport in Auckland.  Things start getting epic as soon as you touch the ground!  How can you not think you're in for an adventure when you see something like this?