As the years passed, I talked to more and more people who had actually made the journey to the other side of the world. They all came back from honeymoons and the like full of praise for the place, and I continued to distantly dream. ‘It is a very long way’, I thought, ‘one day, I’ll make it happen.’ And more time passed. I went to Mexico. I went to Central Europe. I made a few small trips in the US. And then I met Dylan. And last March as I lay on the couch, thumbing through Pinterest, I sent him a text with a picture of a mountain in New Zealand, and said ’someday, I really want to go there.’ And he said, ‘Maybe next year?’

All of a sudden the dream was alive again, and when he got his new year’s allotment of vacation time, and we were trying to decide on a wonderful big adventure to take, nothing else would do. We bought our plane tickets in August. The very next day I booked us onto the Evening Banquet Tour in Hobbiton and a black water rafting tour in Waitomo and we built the thing out from there. One piece at a time we filled our itinerary with marvelous adventures. In all we spent over a year actively dreaming it and eight months physically planning it.

And then, my friends, we spent two weeks doing it. About four days spent getting there and back, and fourteen magical days in the place itself. And the only way we could convince ourselves to get on the plane to come home was to promise that we would go back again within five years and spend even longer.

I suppose when you dream a thing for such a very long time, you run the risk of building your expectations up too high and coming out the other side disappointed. But perhaps on the flip side of that, the excitement and expectation can instead inspire you to take full advantage of the situation and do things you wouldn’t normally try. Repelling 135 feet down a small hole into a cave? Climbing two waterfalls in said cave with no support gear? Riding a horse through the uncut bush on the side of a mountain? Crossing rope bridges and riding shotgun in a helicopter when I am horrendously afraid of heights? Well, yes. How often are we in New Zealand?

When I was in high school, first interested in The Lord of the Rings and trying, as you do, to identify with the characters, I think I fancied myself an elf. Graceful, ageless, and serenely magical. A typical choice for a teenager. As I’ve begun to settle more firmly into myself over the years, however, I’ve come to realize that, of all the creatures in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I am undoubtedly a hobbit instead. Short of stature, immensely fond of hearth and home, birds, and gardens, a nice rambling walk, and good food. Inevitably, if given the choice on a typical evening, of wandering out into the world, or staying put in a comfortable chair with a pot of tea and a good book, I’ll choose the latter. But, just like Bilbo Baggins, I seem to have picked up some fairy genes somewhere along the line, because I am a hobbit who also enjoys a good adventure. A chance to find myself ‘doing and saying things altogether unexpected.’ For isn’t that the way of it? Even with months of planning, and an itinerary almost entirely set when we first put our feet out the door, you can never leave the comforts of home and expect to know exactly what you will encounter along the way. You will almost certainly come back changed. And really, that’s half the fun of an adventure.

When we set out on this pilgrimage to the other side of the world, I knew we would be embarking on a number of things slightly beyond my usual comfort level. Had I known exactly what a couple of those activities would entail, I probably would have opted out in advance, choosing a tamer option, claiming lack of sufficient experience. But the gift of not knowing is that you head on in optimistically, find yourself in a challenging situation with no other choice than to give it a try, and find that you are, in fact, capable of more than you thought.

Perhaps it was ultimately only the permission I was giving myself, but I felt like there was a lot less red tape and hand-holding in New Zealand than we have in the United States. Less the fear of getting sued out of your life in a litigious culture and more an attitude of, ‘you’re an adult, don’t do stupid shit and you’ll be fine.’ It was refreshing. Empowering, even. I want to explore more caves, trek through more uncut bush on the back of a horse, climb more mountains, swim with more rays in more reefs. The ultimate trick is to hold onto that feeling now that we’ve passed back through the mind numbing vortex of plane rides and recrossed our own threshold to find home unchanged. But we are changed, aren’t we? We’ve been there and back again. This very morning as I was fighting off terrible anxiety about booking a car and driver for a tour I have coming up (a thing I’ve never done before, and was seriously dreading), I reminded myself of the feeling I had standing in the middle of that swaying rope bridge in Kaitoke, and made the call. I think I still prefer crossing rope bridges and climbing waterfalls to adding logistical elements for which I am responsible to my tours, but it is certainly nice to be able to remind myself that I’ve conquered things for which the consequences of failure are definitley higher than boggling logistics.

At the end of our banquet in the Shire’s own Green Dragon Tavern, our guide gave us lanterns and led us back through the lanes of Hobbiton to the Party Field. He gathered us in a circle in the middle of the meadow and asked us to turn off our lanterns and close our eyes, and picture the hobbit hole we had passed on our tour and claimed as our own. We all had one, he knew. He told us then that this evening would end and we would all go back to our lives wherever those happened to be, and, inevitably, we would find ourselves in the midst of a very bad day. At that point, he said, from this moment on, we could forever and always close our eyes and picture ourselves walking home to our very own hobbit hole in Hobbiton in the Shire in Middle Earth, and feel better knowing the place was real. And then he asked us to open our eyes, and I looked up and saw more stars than I had ever seen. The Milky Way stretching out bright and clear above us. It was magic. And it was real.

A week and a half home, I’m still waking up in the middle of the night not quite knowing where I am. But even as normal life starts to settle again around me, bringing with it all its usual challenges, I can still go back in my mind to all of the magical moments in New Zealand. I can remember who I was on the other side of the world, and take heart. And more than that, I can be inspired to walk out the door again, and follow the road wherever it may lead next, and continue to make the very most of this very remarkable life.