Both kinds of music

Heading south from beautiful Inverell, we landed in Tamworth, on Kamilaroi country.

Tamworth is, of course, Australia's undisputed country music capital. But it’s a lesser known fact that you can actually find both kinds of music here: country and western. Very exciting if that's your thing. It's not really our thing, although we confess to having both Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash in our ukulele repertoire - both county and western (but don’t ask us which is which).

Despite our musical preferences, we enjoyed strolling around the town and taking in all the country music sights and sounds. This included dinner with our travelling companions at a pub that produced an experience almost on par with that of the Glengarry Hilton. Suffice to say we’re now banned from selecting future dining venues. Two strikes and we’re out!

Unlike Parkes, a bit further down the highway and host of the country’s annual Elvis Festival, Tamworth seems to have ploughed a good chunk of the earnings from its annual Country Music Festival back into the town. There are hectares of lush parks, walking tracks and a buzzing main street with interesting cafes and every chain store outlet you could ever want. All adorned with country music memorabilia, statues and recognition plaques. There are state of the art sporting facilities, including a massive equestrian centre, and lots of picnic spots and playgrounds to keep the kiddies entertained.

Then there’s the infamous Golden Guitar, which sits nestled between a massive retail outlet, a motel and a couple of fast food joints. Our visit to Tamworth coincided with some kind of state-wide kids’ sporting competition and when we went to pay homage at the Golden Guitar, there was what looked to be several hundred young people all queueing up in front of it for their turn to snap a selfie. We couldn’t be bothered joining the throng so we snuck around and snapped a pic from the back. You can’t see the strings but it’s a guitar. You get the picture.

All in all, we had an enjoyable stay in Tamworth. The only sad bit was saying farewell to two of our travelling companions. So we’re now down to three humans and four doggos for our journey toward home.

We hope you enjoy these photos of our stay in Tamworth. If you look really closely you can see that the Labs are super excited to have their photo taken next to a statue of the great Slim Dusty and his partner, Joy Kirkpatrick.