at the Country Music Capital

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We're on the road again! We have free time between now and school holidays so decided we'd load the motor home once more and hit the highway.

We were held up not far out of Sydney by a long cement bridge span falling from a truck, but after an hour's wait, we could get going again. This time we headed north-west from Raymond Terrace - Morpeth, the beautiful country of Patterson and Dungog, and on to Muswellbrook. The caravan parks were all full, mostly of permanents - miners - there are a lot of coal mines in the area. However, we were able to park at the end of a road in the caravan park for the night, and being self sufficient, we were quite OK with that.

Today we drove through Scone, 'the horse capital' where Emerites have their huge horse stud - there were the most beautiful horses in the paddocks - and then on to Tamworth. Tamworth is Australia's Country Music Capital and though we've been here many times, we've never done the country music thang! We always say that one day we'll come to the big Country Music Festival which is held on the Australia Day weekend but that's something we've still to do.

What we did do today was to first go to the Information Centre, behind which there was the Walk a Country Mile exhibition. This was excellent and featured all the well-known Australian country singers from Tex Morton and Buddy Williams on, those who have won Gold Guitars and featured videos of their stories and performances, and lots of memorabilia .. really great. It was interesting to see a photo of a young Keith Urban with a serious mullet being presented with his first Golden Guitar.

We then headed to the Big Golden Guitar Tourist Centre where quite of few of these artists are imortalised in a wax museum. My favourites have always been Slim Dusty, Lee Kernaghan and Troy Casser-Daly so I was pleased to see them well represented.

We are staying in a caravan park in Tamworth - maybe tomorrow we'll do the trifecta and visit the Country Music Hall of Fame before we leave. I feel I should have a guitar on board, or at least boots and an Akubra! I do have some country music on the computer .. maybe that will have to do.

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