Recently my wonderful oldest step daughter and her talented engineer/photographer husband traveled for three weeks in New Zealand. One of their Christmas gifts to us was a calendar they had made with some of Cole’s photography. I was so impressed! I have never had the opportunity to travel there myself, but anyone I’ve known who has vacationed in New Zealand had nothing but good things to say about this beautiful country.

There are two larger islands (North and South) and about 600 much smaller islands. Mountains, beaches, waterfalls, volcanoes, rolling green hills – the landscape is breathtakingly spectacular! In fact, you might even find a crew in New Zealand shooting a movie. You might recognize the setting of “Lord of the Rings” or “The Hobbit” as you view these scenes. Even though New Zealand time is way ahead of us, when I look at these pictures it looks like time stands still. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

Fun fact: The Hobbiton set was built out of foam and other temporary materials at first then taken down after filming the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. But when they were preparing to film the “Hobbit” trilogy, so many people came to see the landscape at the filming location that they decided to rebuild the set out of permanent materials. It took over two years!