south island road trip!-Day 13

the stream gandolf crosses on shadowfax to warn the steward of Gondor about oncoming battle

yep, we were in the battle of Pelennor fields

our view of mt cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand

Day 13- Twizel and Mt Cook

So this was easily the nerdiest day of our entire trip.  

We had slept just outside of Twizel and woke up to a cattle drive going right past our van.  After that amusing wake up call  we made our way into the small city and booked our Lord of the Rings Tour of Pelennor fields (That is where a really big battle takes place in the 3rd movie and there are elephants and such).   The man at the info desk smiles and asks us "so ur really into lord of the rings?".  We are used to being embarrassed about it by now so of course we tell him yes and to our surprise he whips out photos of himself as an orc in the movie!  Apparently we chose the right place to have a tour because Peter Jackson pretty much rallied the entire small town into working on his film. 

To our delight we ended up being the only 3 on the tour and we rode happily with our tour guide to the battle fields!  Our tour guide was very friendly and showed us clips of the movie while we gazed excitedly at the matching scenery.  She also told us a lot of background info about her friends who were orcs or some of the kids who got to be rohan riders in the movie.

But the real fun began when the tour guide lead us out of the van and to the trunk.  What was back there . . . can you guess?  Costumes and replicas of all the armour and weapons in the movie! Since it was only the three of us we had free reign and you can imagine the dorky scene that followed.  we ran around  with the tour guide snapping our pictures and uttering suggestions of what reanactments we should do.  We must have been a sight lol.

Anyways, after the tour we decided to drive to the Mt Cook township and try to take a short trek before heading back to Christchurch.  We did a short 30 minute trek to the view point where we luckily got a fairly clear view of the tallest mountain in New Zealand.  It was neat to see these snow covered mountains because most of the mountains in the southern alps chain that we had seen were not yet white on top.  We made good timing, because as we were hopping in our van a storm cloud overtook the valley where we had just been and it looked like it was about to get really rainy.  We raced the storm cloud back through Twizel and began our 300km journey back to Christchurch.