Getting all country in Tamworth.

At the end of January each year, the township of Tamworth hold their annual Country music festival. The festival runs for about 9 days and people flock from all around to listen to Country music from many local and international artists.Jasmine and I had a couple of free days, so we took the opportunity to travel up to Tamworth to check out the final weekend. Now I must say, I’m not a country music fan, in fact plenty of people looked at me strange when I mentioned that we were going,but I figure that’s what travel is about, opening your mind to new things, so why not give it a chance!Leaving early on a Saturday morning, we drove the three and a bit hours to get to Tamworth. We had planned to camp, so had packed up the camping supplies, but we didn’t really know where we were going to end up. I had an idea from the website that there was camping available on the sporting grounds but thought that I would quickly stop in at the information centre to see if there was anything else on offer. Rookie mistake! There was so many people! I definitely underestimated how popular this event was!!! There was no way we were going to get a carpark let alone someone to talk to, so we continued on to where I thought the sporting grounds where located, and luckily found them easily. The location was terrific, it’s walking distance to town, has hot showers, but no power, for $90 for three nights and even though it was a bit crowded we found a great spot next to a lovely older couple from Queensland so it wasn’t too loud!!

After setting up camp we walked into town, unfortunately missing the parade, but the buskers were out in full force. Just wandering up and down the main street was entertaining as the buskers battled it out for the major busker’s award that was to be announced later that night on the main stage. Often groups of line dancers would spontaneously start dancing in front of a musician adding to the atmosphere. We particularly loved a performer who is from the Gold Coast called Mitch King, so much that we bought his CD and got his autograph! He also later that night was the winner of the busking competition, so I suppose we must have a good sense of judgement!

Later that night, after attending the buskers award ceremony, we hung out in the main street watching more entertainment on the smaller stages, and performers in the local pubs belt out their tunes. Security was great throughout the festival both during the day and night, we witnessed one incident that was dealt with very quickly by the police, so it was safe for families to be out and about at night with their children.

The next day there wasn’t a huge amount going on in town, a couple of buskers and market stalls, so we found a Sushi bar and ate our lots of our favourite food and later in the afternoon we found a spot front of stage for the festivals final concert and fireworks. The concert was a wrap up of Country music performers, some winners of golden guitars, and even though I didn’t know most of them, it was a great way to finish up the weekend.

If we have a chance I will go again, but I would make sure we got up there for the final Friday night to catch the concert and the Saturday morning parade.