Much of the North Island was clear-cut to make pastureland for them, and everywhere we drove, often on both sides of the road, there were hills full of sheep. Usually some would even picturesquely silhouette themselves on the hilltop for our special enjoyment. 

They don't photograph especially well, alas, at least not for me, but they were inevitably charming and delightful, and are my favorite thing about New Zealand.

This, though, is probably my partner's favorite thing about New Zealand, and for good reason:

But actually it was awesome! The tour groups were far enough apart that I could take photos without anyone in the background, something that never would have been possible if we'd all been set free to wander at will:

So please pardon me, because I DO need you to see every single photo of every single lovely hobbit hole we visited:

Spring has to be the perfect time to visit Hobbiton. All the flowers were in bloom, so much so that you couldn't see some of the hobbit holes behind their owners' verdant blossoms. The weather also could not have been more perfect:

The entire place is set-designed to look like a busy hobbit village. It's a little disconcerting in that everything is left exactly as it would be if all the inhabitants had recently been Raptured--

--but, again, you can't say that it's not charming!

Our tour guide took this photo of the vista, including the adjacent farmlands--I imagine that getting to play with other people's cameras adds a little bit of fun to the process of taking forty tourist's photos in the doorway of the same hobbit hole five times a day:

And of course, at the very top of the tallest hill is the most famous hobbit hole of all:

Every detail is book-perfect!

You can't really tell from my photos, but depending on where we were on the hillside, the hobbit holes were built to different sizes. Some are 100% human scale for the actors playing hobbits to interact with, some are 90% human scale, which I think is so the dwarves can look at little outsized(? Please correct me if I'm wrong, because I SUPER want to know!), and some are 60% human scale, which is for the actors playing humans to interact with, as the average hobbit is 60% the size of the average human. I think these next few hobbit holes are the 60% ones:

But you can't really tell from the photos, right, because regardless of the size, all the details are perfect!

Here's where Bilbo celebrated his eleventy-first birthday party. I, personally, wasn't really on the tour for its movie set-ness, but rather its book set-ness, but we still got lots of good gossip about what it was like to film the party scene here, including the secret ingredient to keeping small children party-wild over the course of an overnight film shoot: SUGAR!

And here we are making our way past the outskirts of Hobbiton and on towards the Green Dragon: