the day begins

It rained overnight and into the early morning hours. When I woke on Friday to make my way to the Copthorne Oriental Bay Hotel where the Red Carpet group was staying, the streets and sidewalks bore evidence of the showers in the form of sporadic, shallow puddles. I did my best to avoid them – along with the dripping awnings along Taranaki Street and Courtenay Place – during my twenty-five-minute walk down to the bay. It was a windy and slightly chilly morning in the city, but at least the clouds overhead seemed all rained out.

Navigating my way to the Pencarrow Conference Room, I entered just as calligrapher and mapmaker Daniel Reeve was finishing up his breakfast session with the August Fellowship. When I walked in, the “Lord of the Rings” artist was holding up a hand-drawn map of Middle-Earth and explaining the techniques he used to make it look aged. The August group, seated around a large conference table in front of Daniel, all had their cameras pointed at him and the map. The table itself was piled high with more maps, sketches, watercolors, and pages of calligraphy of all different styles. Quite a few items in the top layer of parchment were familiar – a map of the Shire, a page written in Dwarvish, and the cover page of Bilbo Baggins’ “Red Book” emblazoned with “A Hobbit’s Tale” in a scrawling script – all of which appeared on screen in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. I remembered most of them from a similar session three years earlier, though a few “Chronicles of Narnia” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” items were new, since Daniel had worked on those films since 2005.

Daniel, with his T-shirt, jeans, and casual smile, is the type of unlikely person that can captivate without even trying. His artistic talents and amusing anecdotes had the August Fellowship enthralled, and Raewyn was the only one who noticed me come in.

“What perfect timing!” she whispered as I sidled over to her at one end of the table. “Daniel’s just finishing up here.” We had planned it out so that I would join the group at the end of his session. But, even though his show-and-tell officially ended minutes after I came in, we remained in the conference room for at least half an hour more. Daniel was taking special quote requests (for a mere $20, he would personalize a quote in any Middle-Earth script) and posing for plenty of photos. Susi, her long grey hair pulled back in a low ponytail, seemed intent on photographing everyone and everything in the room at least twice. She even took my picture in front of the large windows overlooking Oriental Bay, where the sun was struggling to break through the clouds.

“Okay,” Vic eventually piped up, clasping his hands together in a signal of finality. “We need to get moving. They’re expecting us at Weta, and we can’t be late.”

“Oh, yes, yes! Don’t want to be late for Weta!” Raewyn chimed in. I had to smile at the Jameses. Vic, in his mild-mannered tones, and Raewyn, with her complete enthusiasm for everything, made the perfect guiding couple. They weren’t the archetypal patronizing tour guides, but nor were they disorganized or lackadaisical in their handling of the day-to-day tasks associated with running group tours. Somehow, with them, everything just flowed.