Our delicious continental breakfast was served to our rooms at 8am, and we were packed up and in our bus just after 9.

We left Thames and drove a short distance to Karangahake Gorge, where Luke had researched a walk though the railway tunnel and a disused gold mine site. It was very scenic and reasonably flat…..and a one and a half hours’ round trip!

From there we drove to Matamata for our Hobbiton movie set tour. As it didn’t start until 2pm, we stopped in the town centre to visit the Information Centre and have lunch. Our last family holiday together in 2016 to Victoria involved pies and sausage rolls for lunch every third day, so we nostalgically found a bakery/pie shop which had yummy bargain pies. This was also the site of today’s unnecessary expense: 50c for little containers of tomato sauce! (And I had two left over because some kids were so disgusted by the price they refused them!)

The Hobbiton tour was expensive but very worthwhile, even for the three members of our group who haven’t seen any of the movies. (We did have fun watching Aunty Beck nod along like she knew what scenes they were talking about!). It was a two hour tour that walked past 44 hobbit holes and set pieces and ended with a free beer or ginger beer in a replica Green Dragon Inn.

It was an hour’s drive from there to our accommodation in Rotorua. We quickly unpacked and drove on to a dodgy part of town to The Factory Smokehouse, a restaurant we had read about online that had excellent reviews. We were craving a steak, but it turned out to be homemade burgers – they were delicious, and while the decor reflected the suburb more than the food, the meals were the North Island’s answer to Fergburger.

Our accommodation, which we booked based on the excellent reviews, is spacious but has MANY problems….no sheets or blankets for four of the beds, inferior aircon, and NO plug for the kitchen sink to name a few!! I feel a polite letter of complaint coming on…..