Old Bar beach festival 2019 - Kombis Kombis Kombis!

For the October long weekend, we travelled to Old Bar on the mid-north coast of New South Wales for the 15th Old Bar beach festival. The main reasons we made the trip to Old Bar were for the Kombi cruise on Saturday and the Kombi record display on Sunday. We were very pleased that we made the decision to do most of the driving on Friday afternoon, so that there was only an hour or so to complete the journey on Saturday morning even though the Friday traffic was horrible.

Kombi cruise

We arrived at the the festival at about 2pm after checking in at the caravan park in the morning. We wandered around the market for an hour or so and then noticed a lot of Kombi owners getting in their cars and moving them. We FOMO-ed and did the same. We just followed the crowd. The Kombis assembled on the old air strip in sections (T1, T2, T3, others). This took a while and, being first-timers, we had no idea what was going on. After parking at the air strip, we got out, took a few photos and talked to some of the other Kombi owners to get some idea of what to expect. The T1s set off first (for those of you who don't know what that means - it's the original Kombi van), followed by the T2s, the T3s (that's us!) and then the others (including Beetles).

The procession of T3s leaving for the Kombi cruise.

One important takeaway I learned from this experience is that if you're in Old Bar for the festival and you drive a Kombi, you're treated like a rockstar. Locals line the streets and wave and cheer at you (they even have special VW salutes). If you’re not a Kombi driver and you dare to cut in to the ‘cruise’ to interrupt the line, you’re booed and hissed. The Kombi cruise runs all the way out to the highway, around the roundabout and back again. In all, about 24 kilometres. As you drive out from the main part of town, you see folks sitting out on their front lawn on their folding chairs with glasses of wine waving and cheering. Most of them stick around till the last Kombi has passed (on the return leg). The Kombi drivers also beep and wave at each other.

Cruise route

Kombi record display

The next morning we returned to the festival, this time for the Kombi record display. So for this, you rock up, pay $5, receive a sweet commemorative bumper sticker, park your car, open it up and greet people that come by to have a look. It was a long day, but ...

at least I could buy my coffee from a Kombi!

There were no prizes for best in show, just a lucky prize draw at the end of the day. mrshill and I made our own judgements for best in show. They had to look good inside and out. It wasn’t enough just to have a smart paint job and shiny wheels!

Best T1

This sweet little blue number even had a bar in the back:

... but she looked great from every angle. The red and white awning looks so cute!

Best T2s

T2s were the most popular category. There were 307 vans parked in total (a new record). By my estimates at least 200 of them would have been T2s (they are the most iconic after all!). Thus, it was hard to pick just one. These were the ones we liked:

Red. Looks good inside and out.

Very smart-looking green number.

Green was popular on the day.

Best T3

We’re biased but ours was clearly the best. There were some nice ones at the parade the day before that didn’t make an appearance for the record display, which was disappointing. I was hoping to get a look inside. Anyway, this was them lined up alongside each other:

In case you didn’t know, ours is the first one (the bright blue one with blue pop-top).

There were a few others scattered about but none of them were noteworthy.

We had such a fun weekend. Thanks for reading.

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