I thought I would share with theonering.net my experience on the Red Carpet Movie Tour’s LOTR ultimate fantasy 12-day tour (http://www.redcarpet-tours.com). I’m on a small VIP tour of travel agents. I’ll send in updates as time and connectivity permit. This is the sixth installment.

Feb 23rd

Today’s installment will be fairly short, as we spent much of the day in travel. We got up bright and early, and headed to the inter-island ferry. The trip across Cook’s Straight takes about 3 hours. It was a pleasant trip, especially for someone like me who loves to be on the water. When we landed, we piled into our minivan and headed off to Nelson. On the way there we stopped in Havlock at The Muscle Boys for some of the fabulous local green muscles. They were so good we ended up ordering more. We continued along the coastline into Nelson and headed for WOW, the wearable art museum (http://www.worldofwearableart.com). We had the fortune of being given a guided tour – really nice. Several of the artists who worked on LOTR have pieces at the museum, and our guide pointed them all out to us. As a costume designer, I found the place, very, very cool. There are some really amazing works in the place and I’d love to meet the designers. Finally, we topped the day off by going to the shop of Jens Hansen, the jeweler who designed the one ring. Unfortunately, the Jens himself has passed on, but his son, Thorkild now runs the shop. There is a small display in the window that talks about Jens’ and Thorkild’s work on LOTR (Thorkild worked on the one ring as well as doing a ring for Elrond). The original prototype for the one ring is in the window.

How cool is that?

Tomorrow – more travel – this time down to Christchurch.

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