Parkes Loves Elvis

Every year for the last 20 years Parkes has held it's Elvis Festival Find Out More About It Here.

What with Parkes being only an hour or so's drive from us you would think that music loving people that we are would have made our way there way before now. Nope every year I find out about the festival from people at work or play who have just spent the weekend there .. I always miss out. This year someone said to me on one sunny Monday in the middle of one of the fiercest heat waves that Australia has had in many a year ...'You going to the Elvis Festival this weekend?' I have to be honest, I did jump up and down a little bit in excitement .. 'You mean I haven't missed it?!?!?!' was my reply.

So I went home to Terry and told him that the Elvis Festival was on. Half a hour later Terry came back out of his office and told me we had accommodation for the whole weekend. Wheeeee!!

We were booked in for Saturday and Sunday night, the plan was to make our way down to Parkes early on Saturday morning for two reasons .. to beat the heat and see the street parade. We slept in a bit .. we missed the parade and the heat nearly beat us by the time we got there. But hey we got there and, after going to the wrong motel to start with, we finally had a nice cool shower and wandered down the street to see what was happening.

We found the commemorative wall of Fame.

There wasn't a real lot actually happening in the street, I think there was supposed to be buskers and stuff but it was already 38ºC at 11 am so I didn't blame anyone for making their way indoors. The shops had gone all out for the festival though and there were some wonderful displays in the windows. The theme for this year was an Aloha Elvis in Hawaii theme.

Parkes was founded by Sir Henry Parkes, who also gets into the Festival mood every year.

Let's go look for food at one of the clubs or pubs, we made for the park with the markets and the Big stage that was promising free Elvis's all weekend. It had lots of Elvis's but I spotted the cars with big fins, these were the cars that had been in the parade and I wanted to go look at the pretties.

After looking at stuff and finally finding food we headed back to the motel at about 4pm, by this time it was 43ºC and the walk back to the motel proved too much for us. We got the first taxi we saw.

 Dinner was at the motel that night and we got to listen to Elvis while we dined and had cocktails.

 












T'was a lovely relaxing day even in the heat. The next day we were planning to go to an early morning Gospel service with ... yep you guessed it .. Elvis, then go check out the Elvis museum which also boasted having a car and farm machinery museum.

The next morning dawned bright and hot again, and we slept in again. Oh well we'll see the Gospel Service next year. First thing on the agenda is to check the bikes and get some aloha pics of them.

Lucky we weren't riding that day, the heat was as bad as the day before and storms were being predicted for that evening. There were fires close by but none that were effecting us yet, we were keeping an eye on the websites. We did get to visit the Henry Parkes Centre Complex which has all those museums in it. There was a lot of fascinating stuff in there so I'll save that for the next post .. and the trip home was going to include a visit to The Dish, would be interesting to see how it looks in the middle of summer.