introduction

In the travel narrative that follows, I aimed to delve into the niche market of “Lord of the Rings” tourism in New Zealand, focusing on Red Carpet Tours and the people who are a part of them. Through travel writing, I strove to capture not only the beauty of New Zealand and charm of Red Carpet Tours, but also the unique characters of the people who travel halfway around the world in order to experience Middle-Earth.



It’s hard to believe that I have been having a mild love affair with “The Lord of the Rings” for more than seven years now. It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in a movie theater not long after New Year’s, getting absorbed in a story about little people with hairy feet trying to destroy a piece of jewelry. Even harder to believe is the fact that I, a small-town girl from northeast Ohio, took that obsession seriously enough to make it all the way to New Zealand (home of Middle-Earth) more than three years ago, when I toured the country for two weeks.

But the hardest thing for me to believe is that my love of “Lord of the Rings” and, subsequently, New Zealand, led me to move 10,000 miles away from home to live there for five months. If someone would have told me after my first jaunt to Middle-Earth that I would be living there someday, I don’t know that I would have believed them. But, somehow, July 2008 found me packing my allotted two suitcases in preparation to move to Wellington, New Zealand.

Now that I’ve returned, I still have some difficulty comprehending how I ended up there to begin with. I guess the hobbit Bilbo Baggins knew what he was talking about when he said, “It’s a dangerous business going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.”