We thought New Zealand was going to be easy.

Before my husband, Jason, and I got married, we'd taken a few vacations that played out like low-budget episodes of "The Amazing Race." We'd hitchhiked in Mozambique, pushed a broken-down car across the Swaziland border and toured glaciers in Argentina shortly after its economy collapsed.

For our honeymoon, we thought, we'd plant our feet firmly on the beaten track, escaping a Pittsburgh winter for several weeks to go someplace warm and full of English speakers.

Battling the elements, you see, was not part of our plan.

But during the New Zealand "summer" in late December and early January, we encountered hail, snow, hurricane-force winds and Doppler radar images lit up.

Mostly though, it rained. And rained. The skies opened up every single one of the 11 full days we had there, and we're talking rain measured in deluges, not drizzles.

Our challenge, and unfortunately we had no choice but to accept it, was to make the best of a wet situation.

It was hard to muster too much hostility toward a country considerate enough to put two-ply toilet paper in its airport bathrooms, but still, a few simple rules helped us stay (mostly) sane in the face of New Zealand water torture.

Rule 1: There's no shame in canceling if you haven't already paid.

There are two types of Americans who travel to New Zealand: fanatical devotees of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and the rest of us. While Jason falls more into the first camp, I'm squarely in the second. But in the spirit of compromise, we had agreed to tour the only remaining set used in the movie, at the Hobbit habitat of the Shire near the town of Matamata.

As we drove south from Auckland on our first full day in New Zealand, blissfully unaware that the dark clouds amassing above us would become our constant traveling companions, the landscape transformed from the tropical forests of suburban Auckland into grazing land of gently rolling hills dotted with dark green trees.

But as we entered Matamata, which briefly changed its name to "Hobbiton" following the release of the first movie, even a statue of Gollum in the town center looked uncomfortable getting mercilessly drenched.

At the information center, we learned that the tour would have been 2 1/2 hours long and cost us nearly $100. In the sun, maybe. But in a downpour, no way.

And so, lesson learned, we headed toward our next destination of a geothermal Maori settlement in Rotorua — where, thankfully, umbrellas were included with the price of admission.

Rule 2: When you're wet, you're wet.