Waking up to another magical day in Coffs Harbour, not a cloud in the beautiful blue sky gave me the idea; it is time for a road trip west of Coffs Harbour for the day.

I phoned my daughter and said, “do you feel like a road trip today?” With enthusiasm, she replied, “yes, but where?” “What about driving to Armidale, which is less than 200 kilometers from here?”

A car full of petrol, our journey commenced at 7.30am knowing Armidale can be much colder than on the coast, we prepared ourselves suitably with suitable shoes, jeans, and jacket.

Driving up through Bellingen, Dorrigo, Ebor and all the small towns in between gave us the perfect opportunity to talk about everything that was happening in both our lives. It only took a few hours before we drove through the most beautiful autumn leaf maple trees residing on both sides of the road. “We have arrived in Armidale”.

I couldn’t resist pulling over the car and taking some selfies with the magnificent autumn trees in the background, so beautiful!

“Let’s do a bit of looking around before we have lunch”. We found a rather unique oldest style café’ in a small shopping centre where we noticed everyone wore jumpers and jackets. We had jackets with us but didn’t feel it was cold enough to wear them to the shopping centre. This was probably why everyone appeared to be looking at us like we were strange.

After sharing a blueberry pancake stack and having a cup of coffee we continued with our sightseeing around Armidale. I thought to myself, Tamworth is only 100 kilometers further. I said to my daughter “Do you want to drive onto Tamworth?” “Absolutely!”

The pancake and coffee gave us plenty of sustenance and time to digest during the drive southwest to Tamworth home of the ‘big guitar’ and the famous country singers and of course line dancing.

Trying to find the big guitar challenged my GPS app, but we found it to the delight of my daughter who worked near there approximately for two weeks when she attended some regional training about twenty years ago when she worked for Prime TV Sydney.

After looking through the information centre and taking photos of the famous guitar personalities like; Dolly Pardon, Kenny Rogers, Beccy Cole, Kris Kristofferson, Keith Urban and Troy Cassar-Daley it was time to find another interesting eatery before we headed back home to Coffs Harbour.

I thought instead of going back via Dorrigo why not travel down through the Enfield Forest mountain ranges to Port Macquarie then home.

This was not a good idea, as it turned out to be more than 100 kilometers of winding road with forests after forests before we came to the township of Wauchope, then onto Port Macquarie for a nice rest and our evening meal. Our decision to eat at West Point Club was probably one of the best locations we chose for the day. The club is positioned overlooking the Hastings River, although rather difficult to appreciate the view at 7.30pm. Our meal wasn’t like most clubs; it actually looked and tasted delicious giving us sufficient provisions for the 140 kilometers back home.

The decision for a one-day road trip to Armidale, which turned into including Tamworth and Port Macquarie, was definitely too much to achieve in a one-day trip.