Luckily?, I woke at 3am sneezing (Deb putting her new feather duster to work on the blinds in the van late yesterday afternoon), after getting up to get a tissue I found the back end of the van wet! It was raining most of the night and we had left one of the roof vents fully open all night. That’s where the luck comes in, I was able to close the vent and mop up all the water before we got flooded out!
We eventually woke around 8am, packed the van up and were on the road to Tamworth around 9am. The drive was easy, and through the greenest country side we have travelled through yet.
On the way we stopped in Coonabarabran to have a look at the Diprotodon and Megafauna display. They have the skull and skeleton of a Diprotodon , the largest marsupial to ever live, a bit like a huge wombat!
An interesting little break on our journey and something you don’t see every day! 🙂
We arrived in Tamworth around 1pm and were set up and back at the Information Centre by 2pm. Armed with a lot of brochures and a few ideas we headed out to the Golden Guitar Tourist Centre. It is nestled in between a KFC and Macca’s, I mistook the entrance for one of the fastfood joints and so drove straight by, which as it turned out was a stroke of luck. We couldn’t turn around immediately so we drove down the road a bit and saw a couple of interesting looking buildings, so we drove over and had a look at them. One was an entertainment centre and the other turned out to be the Australian Equine and Livestock Events Centre. We parked and walked over to have a look and found that there was an event on inside. It turns out they were holding the annual Reining Australia Futurity and Continental Affiliate Championships. (Reining is a fast and exciting western riding competition where talented riders will guide their horses through a precise pattern of circles, spins, extreme slides and stops). We watched a few competitors do their stuff 
and the presentation of the Novice Riders Awards. The stops were pretty spectacular. On the way out I grabbed myself a copy of the Winter edition of Equine News to get up to date on horsey things and then we had a look over the stalls that were set up at one end of the arena, there were stalls selling everything from Saddles and spurs to lingerie (a bit like 50 Shades meets country I guess 🙂 ). Out the back of the arena were sale yards and training facilities.
We then returned to the Golden Guitar Tourist Centre and got our photo taken in front of the Big Guitar,
had a quick look around and then went into town and up to the top of Oxley Scenic Lookout. It’s a steep climb up there and you get magnificent views over Tamworth and the surrounding countryside. We tried to do a Geocache while we were up there but didn’t have any success as there were muggles about.
The afternoon was getting on a bit so we decided to head back to the van for a bit of relaxing. It’s tough doing this holiday thing 🙂
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