Gandalf moves in to the neighbourhood.

I just celebrated my birthday over the weekend (yup, 29 again), and since the weather was beautiful, we decided to go for a nice long drive, up State Highway 1.

The Kapiti Coast is a part of the Wellington Great Region that I don't often visit, for no really good reason. It's lovely there, in fact. The day before was horrible weather, and when the forecast for the day after my birthday showed more rain, we figured that the gods must be smiling upon us for a good reason, so off we went. Apart from relaxing, I had one planned stop to make, that have been at the back of my mind for a while.

The stop was at Paraparaumu, a small coastal town that has been going through lots of new development recently. Online recently, I stumbled onto a cool street name in one new suburb there, and we just had to visit it.

As you can see from the map below, it's a small crescent that comes off the main road - there don't appear to be any other LOTR related names in the neighbourhood either. All the empty section currently on Google Earth have been filled in with actual houses now, btw.


View Gandalf Crescent in a larger map


I an not sure about the details of how Gandalf Crescant got it's name - I know it didn't exist about five years ago years ago since it's not actually on my car's (paper) map, and all of the houses in the street look to have been built within the last five years, at most. If anyone knows more, please let me know!

Has anyone else got LOTR related names on their local maps? I know New Zealand has a few more - there's a Galadriel Creek, and also three creeks named Nenya, Vilya and Narya, although I haven't found them yet.

Got anything better? Drop me a line!


  - Jack M.