About to leave

Hi everyone, Carmen and I are about to embark on our trip to California (Jan 31) , then New Zealand (Feb 4), Australia and finally Fiji. As you can see the Blog is named "go walkabout" (meaning "to go for a long walk", probably in the outback), even though we are riding and not walking our way through New Zealand and Australia, but you get the gist. Looking at the trip plan our flight from Los Angeles to New Zealand is almost 14 hours. That's a long flight. We will cross the international date line, so we leave Los Angeles on February 4th (around 8:30 PM) and get into New Zealand on the 6th (around 6:30 AM). Good thing we are bringing plenty of books to read.

While on the North Island of New Zealand, we will tour the harbour at Auckland (home of the 2000 America's Cup). We later move on to Waikato where we stop at and tour a glow-worm cave. (Umm, I wonder if any of them are on the menu for dinner?) We move onto Rotorua and visit an area with geysers and boiling mud pots.

Our trip through New Zealand, for you LOTR fans (you know who you are -- if you have to ask, this is Frodo, Legolas, and Aragorn's country), will bring us by (well maybe not to close by) a number of film locations. While on the North Island we will travel from Auckland to Walkato which is home to Hobbiton and the Shire locations, then onto Rotorua. I'm hoping we drive close enough to Taupo where the black gates of Mordor, Mordor and even Mt. Doom locations are. While here I'll try to get pictures of the areas where filming was done. I have a map of New Zealand (you can view it at: http://asni.net/lotr_map.html ) which shows many of the film locations, but unless there are signs I may only get proximity. "Precious!" one might say.

We fly out of Rotorua to Christchurch which in on the south island. If we are unable to get a view of the Mordor and Mt. Doom locations, I'm hoping to get pictures from the air. From Christchurch, we board a train for the TranzAlpine portion of the trip where we cross the Southern Alps. (Here we'll find the locations for the "lighting of the beacon" and Edoras.) We stay overnight at the Franz Josef Glacier Hotel (I'm thinking cold).

The next day we board a bus and continue to Queenstown traveling through the Haast pass and winding through Mount Aspiring National Park, past several lakes, and also Kawarau Gorge. (Around this section of our travels we'll see the Misty Mountains, Fangorn Forest, Rivendell, Lothlorien Woods, Rohan Plains, and more.)

The next day we head back to Christchurch passing Mt. Cook National Park and stopping at various points of interest.

We fly out of Christchurch and land in Melbourne, where we start our Austrailian portion of the trip. We will spent a couple of days there visiting various sightseeing locations.

Next we fly to Cairns. While in Cairns we hope to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef (have to remember to bring underwater cameras). I think we also get to play with the animals. This is where they feed the troubling tourists to the crocs.

From Cairns we fly to Sydney where we will stay 3 nights. Here we will tour the Opera House and we plan to try to walk up on top of the bridge (we'll have to see if we have time). We plan on doing several side trips while here, including sampling Australian wines and beers (oh yeah!).

We leave Sydney and Australia and fly to Fiji. We'll stay in Fiji for three days, resting in the South Pacific sun and waters, oh yeah! From Fiji we fly back to Los Angeles (12 hours) wait a few hours and then fly back to Orlando, Fl (another 5 hours). By then it'll be February 25th.

Anyway, I yabber (Aussie slang for talk to much) so I'll end now and come back while in California and again on Feb 4th when we leave and start our "walkabout".