Today was our last day in Queenstown. Our next home base would be in Luggate, which is just outside of Wānaka. However, before we left the Queenstown area, we wanted to search for a few more Lord of the Rings filming locations, as many scenes from Rohan were filmed in nearby Deer Heights Park.

We’d actually tried to do this after jet boating a couple of days ago but discovered that we had to book in advance. This time we planned a bit further ahead. As we drove up into the hills, we could immediately see why so many scenes were filmed in this area. It’s a beautiful place with mountains drifting in the background.

But this same beauty became part of the problem as we searched for filming locations. Everything looked like a scene from Lord of the Rings. Fortunately, we found a map that helped us focus in on some locations, and Cassie had downloaded a few reference photos. Our first stop was the lake where the people from Rohan took a break on their way to Helms Deep.

We had a beautiful sunny day. But our lake was frozen.

In the films, this is also where Eowyn gave Aragorn some very bad soup.

Team Hubbard planned ahead and brought some soup. It wasn’t much, but it was hot. Or at least lukewarm.

Naturally, as we continued to look for LOTR shots, we kept an eye out for goblins.

Fortunately, we didn’t see any.

(This spot was particularly hard to find because in the movie the image was flipped, so left was right and right was left. Tricksy Peter Jackson.)

No goblins, but lots and lots of goats.

After a bit more searching, we also found the cliff where Aragorn fell to his death. #nospoilers.

Nobody in our crew fell. Plus we learned the “cliff” was only about 6 feet tall.

There were other shots from the movies that we didn’t find, but it was time to be moving on. We took a few last looks at Queenstown and the surrounding mountains.

In fact, we could see the apartment where we’d spent the past week. It is just above Cassie’s hand in the photo below.

We were sad to be leaving, but excited for what was next! We hopped back in the car and drove to find our house in Luggate — house number 5:

Onward!

-Will