Featured image: LEGO set 79003 An Unexpected Gathering composited against the real Bag End hill at Hobbiton, New Zealand
Once Upon a Brick · Chapter 8
The story of how Infinite Brick came to be: the people, ideas, and moments that shaped it. Each chapter reveals another piece of the journey connecting LEGO creativity with the community around it.
Welcome! If you're new to the series, start with Chapter 1: Before the Beginning
You don't forget the drive to Hobbiton.
Especially when you're driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time, somewhere on the North Island of New Zealand, on your honeymoon, three days into a trip you'd been planning since well before you were married.
The wedding itself had been intentionally smaller than it could have been. Not small, just considered. At some point during early planning, we'd had the conversation that most couples probably have and most couples probably lose: the one where you ask whether the money going into a single day might be better redirected somewhere else entirely.
We kept the wedding. We just kept it in proportion.
What we redirected to, was the honeymoon. (Who here thought I was going to say LEGO?)
The idea of New Zealand surfaced the way good ideas sometimes do: half-serious at first, weighted with the unspoken question of can we actually do that? Not just financially. Can we pull away from work that long? Are we the kind of people who go to New Zealand? Is that a thing people just… do?
It turned out that yes, yes we were. We deferred the “real” honeymoon in favour of a “mini-moon” — a weekend retreat a couple of hours north right after the wedding, a spa, crashing and burning after months of planning — and gave ourselves the time to do the bigger thing properly… more than a year later.
Three weeks. Our own rental car the entire time. A Nokia Lumia 1020 with offline maps as our only navigation. No obligations. No kids. Enough saved to say yes when yes was the right answer.
We flew Toronto to LA to Auckland. We landed, settled in for a night, and looked up.
The stars were wrong.
Not wrong — different. You look up expecting the dippers, the patterns that have been there your whole life, and they're just not there. You could have told me I was on another planet and I might have believed you. We were somewhere in the southern hemisphere, in the dark, and the sky was genuinely unfamiliar. That was the moment it landed: we had actually done this.
Day two: Hobbiton.
We drove to a farm outside Matamata and took a bus the last stretch out to the set. The Lord of the Rings films were formative enough that this was in the itinerary early; not the reason for going, but weighted heavily among many things on a trip that kept escalating.
Hobbiton holds up. The detail extends beyond what any camera would have caught. The hillside is real and Bag End sits at the top with its round green door and a tree that, up close, turns out to have its own story.
Photo: Hobbiton — the round door, the hill, the tree
The North Island kept delivering, including a stop at Tongariro, where Mount Ngauruhoe stands in as Mount Doom, active volcano and all. Then the Interislander ferry to the South Island, glaciers, the Redwoods, a long winding drive into Milford Sound on a road where the signs mention landslides… and we saw evidence they weren't exaggerating.
After the fjord cruise, we made a spur-of-the-moment decision: we were not taking the bus back. We dropped what to us at the time was “YOLO money” on a helicopter, lifted off over the fjord, and stopped on a mountain where they let us out into the clouds.
[Photo: helicopter flight back from Milford Sound – mountain top stop; pilot preps for our return]
These are memories of a lifetime.
We had planned to visit a dark-sky observatory near the end of the South Island loop. A mountain, a dark-sky reserve, one of the best places in the world to see the southern hemisphere at night properly. But the sky was cloudy so we didn't make it.
Some moments go the other way.
“Hobbiton holds up.”
We flew home on Easter Sunday, April 20th. Three weeks, two islands, one rental car that earned its keep.
The return to ordinary time was harder than usual. Some trips do that.
The trip stayed with us though. It was the kind that doesn't fully leave… that keeps surfacing in conversation, in photos you scroll back to, in the specific image of a green door on a hillside that somehow still sits clearly in your head months later.
December 2014. Wrapped. Under the tree.
LEGO set 79003: An Unexpected Gathering.
LEGO had launched The Hobbit theme in 2012, timed to the first film. I'd been vaguely aware of it during the recommission era. The sets were detailed, the minifigures excellent, the subject matter immediately appealing. But 2014 had already been an expensive year in the best possible ways, and LEGO was less of a priority for the remainder.
[Amazon order confirmation: LEGO 79003 – An Unexpected Gathering, December 2014]
An Unexpected Gathering is Bag End. The round door. The hill. The table where thirteen dwarves show up uninvited and a hobbit, against all prior evidence, says yes.
Bilbo's home — the specific corner of the Shire the set is built around — was the round green door.
My wife opened it Christmas morning. She built it. Probably the first set either of us had approached with that kind of shared investment; a thing we'd both been there for, that both of us understood the reference to without explanation.
Here's what I want to point out, because I think it's easy to miss:
This was not the same kind of purchase as the M:Tron wave in January.
That purchase was backward-facing. Childhood sets, adult money, a wishlist that had been open for decades. The wanting had been there since before the constraint lifted; I was just finally in a position to reach for it. That kind of purchase is meaningful. Chapter 7 is full of that meaning.
An Unexpected Gathering was a different kind of purchase entirely.
I didn't buy it because it was LEGO. I bought it because of a green door on a hillside in a field outside Matamata. The set was right because the trip was the trip — and because marking the trip with this particular object made sense in a way that a photo book or a fridge magnet couldn't.
That's a different kind of buy. LEGO as a marker for adult life, not just a recovery of childhood.
It would take a while to understand what that pattern meant, and longer still to understand where it was pointing. But the pattern was there. It just needed more time — and a few more sets — to become clear.
Share Your Story
Throughout the journey, we find new reasons to reach for LEGO.
For some it's a place; somewhere they went, something they saw, a trip they wanted to carry home in a different form. For others it's a milestone, a year, a moment worth anchoring. Some sets just find you at the right time.
↓ Tell Your Story ↓
I'd love to hear it.
Until the Next Chapter…
An Unexpected Gathering was the first set bought to mark something, not to own something. It turned out not to be the last.
One of mine had been waiting since I read about it in a book when I was around eight years old.
I came home wanting to mark it with something.
Chapter nine is in the works.
— Tyler | Infinite Brick
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