There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for this treachery...

On November 10th we went on a horseback riding adventure called 'The Ride of the Rings.'

So... horseback riding in New Zealand... it sounds romantic, adventurous, exciting. 

In reality it was miserable, cold, wet and boring.

At least we got to see the edge of Fangorn Forest, a very defined and long tree-line. We also got to ride through the forest of Lothlorien, right past the area where Gimli and company get ambushed by the elves, "a dwarf breaths so loud we could have shot him in the dark." Apparently as a gift to the Paradise region, Peter Jackson had the trail put in for everyone to enjoy. We also saw the location of where they had constructed Beorn's House, which will apparently feature in the second Hobbit film. During filming one of the trees in the shot fell over from the wind, as they had already done so much work, Peter Jackson wanted to CG it in so they wouldn't have to start over, this wasn't possible so he had to go to Weta to build a replica of it, costing him $100,000 in the end. For those keeping track, that's a $600,000 foliage budget, and that's only for two trees. 

We also saw the Wizard's Vale, though in the film for the Isengard Valley they had digitally added a forest of trees over the majority of it. The river that made up the shot is a braided river, glacially formed, and is one of the largest examples of such a river in the world. And we saw Amon Hen, the area in the first film where the fellowship breaks. We saw where Boromir died and the hill where the orcs ran down upon hearing the horn of Gondor. Apparently during the movie the shots of the orcs are so short because the orcs could only run down the hill at full speed for a good two or three seconds in their masks and costumes before falling and injuring themselves and others. To further complicate matters, a zip-line camera designed to rush down the hill with the orcs was strung too low, resulting in the camera colliding with not one but two of the orcs during shooting.

Unfortunately, the time it took to read about the Lord of the Rings locations of today is about how long we spent visiting them in person. The rest of the time we spent on the backs of seriously unimpressed horses that, broken of all free will, followed the leader like a train on rails. Being at the back of the line, the extent of our ride was listening to faint, broken conversations between the guide and people further up the line, and dealing with pelting rain and strong winds. The horses themselves weren't even that interesting. At least Janelle got a pretty one named Court, and I got a seventeen year old named Scar who, when he was a year old, was found with a metal fencepost stuck through his side. To top it all off, we spent another hour driving back to Queenstown, where we were unceremoniously dumped off in the middle of town (after being picked up that morning from our hotel). It was still raining and there was a forty-five minute walk back to our hotel. The sun partly came out halfway along and dried us out a bit, but did absolutely nothing to improve our impression of Dart Stables' incredibly mediocre experience. 

Our hotel room was our saving grace for a second day in a row. We returned to make an amazing pasta with fresh vegetables, alfredo, cheddar cheese, feta cheese, and most importantly, Peppadews, which we ate while watching shows like The Middle, and a new show called Total Black Out, which had us laughing out loud despite the day's earlier events. Contestants are put into a room that is completely black, and in three rounds they have to identify objects by feel, taste, and then smell. When it is so completely dark your mind starts to play tricks on you and everyone on the show got very jumpy, skittish and fearful of what may be in front of them. The funniest was watching them shriek and scream after their fingers grazed a pineapple.