Royal Hotel Caragabal

With our heads still quietly banging to ourselves with the memory of the Euabalong playlist, we headed off on the two hour trek to the next pub on the Tour: the Royal Hotel Caragabal.

Caragabal is the exact small town when you think of the phrase ‘small town in central New South Wales’. It’s not Mount Hope small (there are a collection of houses and other building around this Royal). But it is definitely nails that small town feel. Probably because that’s precisely what it is.

And the Royal Hotel Caragabal is the exact type of pub you expect to find in a town like Caragabal. The major areas of the pub were basically some chairs and tables out front to watch the world go by, and the front bar. It was another one of those where the locals all turned on their stools to give us a once over when we walked in, but then were immediately likeable, interested, and chatty.

We told them about the tour we were on and they were very much enthused by the concept. I may have been slightly unclear in my description of the finer points of the Tour, however. When I told the publican that this was the 55th Royal we’ve been to, her first question was “how are you boys still standing?”. Apparently she thought we meant the 55th of the weekend. Her next question, however, showed she was very good astute and judge of character: “So…do you like get a stubby holder from each of the pubs?”. Whether cunningly or unwittingly, she had stumbled upon a well-documented feature of the tour: a penchant for Royal merch. So before we even had a schooner in hand, we were (quite easily) sold on a stubby holder each.

Once we did have our schooners in hand, we wandered out the front (to watch the world go by). And I’ve gotta say, just chatting out the front of a pub on the quiet main street of a small town was one of my absolute favourite parts of this leg of the tour. That and pool at Mt Hope. And sizing up the silos in Mirrool. Ok there were lots of favourite parts of this leg of the tour.

Later, while searching for the toilets, I wandered through the back parts of the pub. There was a good looking beer garden, a nice pool table, and one corner with a window that served as Caragabal’s post office. And adjacent to that was a bulletin board with some of the best elementary school poetry I’ve ever seen. My favourite was a limerick that started with “There once was a vet called Vildy”. And if your first thought was that ‘Vildy’ is a pretty obviously made up name solely to force a rhyme in the second line, you’d be dead wrong. The second line doesn’t even vaguely rhyme with Vildy.

Stop me if I’ve said this before, but this is definitely a Royal we could’ve spent all day at. It just had an awesome, slow, relaxed vibe that we could’ve easily sunk into (while also sinking half a dozen schooners). The cherry on top was the publican shouting out to us through the opaque screen door “same again boys, or do you have to get back on the road?”. Reluctantly we had to answer the latter, but the fact that we had the option to order via screen door shouting rather than the QR codes of other Royals really just summed up the Royal Hotel Caragabal. To use another cliche for the tour/blog, this is definitely a Royal we’d come back to. But we were drawing close to the end of this leg of the tour and it was time to pile back into the car once again.

Royal Stats

• Town/Suburb: Caragabal, NSW
• Population: 214
• Date Visited: Saturday, February 10, 2024
• Visited By: Cory, John, Jase, and Bert
• Beer Sponsorship on Sign: XXXX
• Beer Consumed at Pub: VB
• Price of Schooner of Said Beer: $7.50
• Unique Award: Best Royal Kids Poetry at the Pub
• Tour Progress: 40.1% (55/137)