Gloucester

I spent this past weekend in Gloucester, New South Wales, Australia. This is where my roommate, Tamara is from, and she invited Autumn and I to go home with her for the weekend. Gloucester is about 9 hours (driving) away from where we live on the Gold Coast, so we prepared ourselves for a road trip. We left Friday morning and arrived Friday night. It was a very beautiful and scenic drive down. We passed The Big Banana, which is a popular tourist rest stop. We even got to see the sunset, which was really pretty. We had a time change an hour ahead when we crossed the New South Wales border.

Tamara took us to the local pub Friday night for a little bit, as it closed at 11pm (and always does!).

Gloucester is a very small town out in the country. It is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and there is one of everything; one grocery store, one doctor, one pub, one post office, etc. Tamara’s graduating class had only 40 people in it!

I tried a famous Gloucester "thick shake", which was delicious :)

Saturday was the Gloucester Show, which is a big event in town. People wait for it all year long. It reminded me of a carnival or a fair. During the day there was horse jumping, wood chopping contests, etc.

It had rides and food stands with typical carnival food.

Fun fact: cotton candy here is called fairy floss!

One of the farmers let Autumn and I take a picture with his bull. He was huge (even though it doesn’t look like it in the pictures), and he was still young and not yet fully grown. He had a ring in his nose and everything.

We spent a good portion of the afternoon at the show and then Tamara took us around town to some lookout points to see the views. It really was beautiful up in the mountains; there was so much undisturbed land and everything was so green.

Later that night we went back to the Gloucester Show with Tamara’s whole family. In addition to everything they had going on during the day, they also had car drifting, the smashup derby, etc. The smashup derby seemed to be the most anticipated event by everyone. The show was wrapped up with a small fireworks show.

It was nice to visit another town, especially one out in the country in New South Wales.