riverECHO

We’ve made it through both the first and second films and are about to embark on the third one. My dad and Fran have even watched most of the extras that go into how the trilogy was filmed, the costumes and props, and the characters. While BJ had to return to work the day after we returned from Milford Sound, the rest of us drove up to Glenorchy, a small town just an hour’s drive up the lake from Queenstown. We knew many scenes from the Lord of the Rings had been filmed in that area but didn’t know which or where. We weren’t a minute away from the house when the questions started coming and I decided that we better prepare ourselves with a bit of solid information to guide our journey instead of just making it all up. We stopped in Queenstown before our departure and went into an official Lord of the Rings Store where Fran purchased a Lord of the Rings Location Guide. My dad narrated the drive up to Glenorchy and we followed a dirt road out to an area called Paradise. It was beautiful and we could see the glaciated peaks of Mount Earnslaw in the background. It was fun having the guide to tell us what had been filmed where but to be honest, all of the names in films sound so similar that I could never really picture which part, or even which of the three films, they were referring to. After a while along the road to Paradise, we backtracked a bit and drove out towards the Routeburn Track where we strolled along the nature walk for a while.

As we left Glenorchy we could see clouds starting to build in the mountains and sure enough the rains came pouring down the next morning. Our big outings over the last two days have been to a local coffee shop and to the cinema and museum in Arrowtown. It’s actually been quite refreshing for us, and my dad and Fran, to have some down time while it rains.