getting there

We eventually turned onto Buckland Road – a complete coincidence, Vic assured us, even though Buckland happens to be the name of a region of Tolkien’s Shire – and began a winding drive onto the Alexander property. Vic popped in a homemade CD with music from Howard Shore’s “The Lord of the Rings” soundtracks on it to set the mood, and I remembered back to a similar CD he had played three years earlier during this same twisting drive. The fiddle refrain of the Shire theme rose and fell as the green hills around us swelled and dipped, almost as if the music had been composed for this very purpose. The CD wasn’t exactly as I remembered it – it has, in the past three years, been supplemented with newly released extended soundtracks and bonus songs – but the emotions I felt were the same.

“I think I’m going to cry,” Melinda said quietly from the back of the van, her German accent making her words sound thick and heavy. Glancing around, I had a feeling Melinda wasn’t the only one.

As the last strains of a pan flute solo faded away, we pulled up to the Shire’s Rest, the departure point for all Hobbiton tours. The small, two-story building – consisting of a conference room, small gift shop, café, and toilets – sits right next to a shearing shed on the edge of a shallow, fenced-in valley dotted with sheep and twisted pine trees. The Shire’s Rest represents the perfect marriage of modern and rustic design, with the café and conference room portion of the building looking polished and new, while the toilets are made to look like a weathered hobbit hole, right down to the doorknobs in the middle of the doors.

Inside the second-story gift shop, we met Alec, our farm guide for the morning. Dressed in a long black Hobbiton coat and a black Hobbiton cap that only partially kept his flyaway grey hair at bay, Alec was the epitome of a rural New Zealand man. His skin was permanently tanned and leathery, he spoke in a low, mumbling drawl thick with Kiwi accent, and I’m not one hundred percent certain that he had all of his teeth.

After passing out brochures and repeating the history of Hobbiton that Vic had shared with us on the drive in, Alec joined us in the van, and we headed for the set. Getting to the location required driving deeper into the farm, with frequent stops to unlatch and re-latch rickety gates to keep the farm’s four-legged inhabitants contained. One or two brave sheep approached the van curiously as we stopped, only to scatter nervously as we rolled on by.

When he wasn’t hopping out of the van to open and close a gate, Alec entertained us with anecdotes about filming. Judging from his stories, Alec didn’t seem to be aware of Vic’s personal involvement in preserving Hobbiton, but I got the feeling that Vic preferred it that way.