Head up the Hume corridor past Picton and Bargo and you climb into the Southern Highlands — three towns, Mittagong, Bowral and Moss Vale, laid out one after another along the old highway. From Menangle Park it's roughly 39 minutes to Mittagong, 45 to Bowral and 54 to Moss Vale by car (aggregator estimates, so treat them as ballpark rather than gospel).

Mittagong is the gateway — the first town you reach, and since the 1992 highway bypass sent through-traffic around its centre, more of a turn-off now than a thoroughfare. The drawcard is the Main Street antiques strip, anchored by the Mittagong Antiques Centre and Reflections Antiques, worth a browse before pushing on to Bowral, six kilometres further.

Bowral is the one with the name recognition. The Bradman Museum & International Cricket Hall of Fame sits at heritage-listed Bradman Oval, where Don Bradman played his early cricket — it opened in 1989 as Australia's only museum built around one person, and the Hall of Fame exhibition was folded in in 2010, taking the collection past 52,000 items. Both Bradman's and his wife's ashes are scattered on the oval. Every spring the town's Corbett Gardens fill with more than 80,000 tulips for Tulip Time, running 11 September to 5 October 2026.

Moss Vale, furthest out, is a rail town before anything else. The line arrived in 1867, and the original platform building — still the oldest structure in town — is on the State Heritage Register; from the 1880s it was a favoured holiday stop for NSW Governors, grand enough to warrant its own Railway Refreshment Rooms. The heritage streetscape has since filled in with design stores, cafes and bars.

Good to know: all three towns sit on the Southern Highlands Line, so a Sydney Trains service from Menangle Park's own platform gets you there without the drive — that's the regular commuter service, distinct from the booked-seat NSW TrainLink trains that also stop at the same platforms. Services run roughly hourly off-peak on weekdays, thinning out on weekends — worth checking transportnsw.info for the current timetable before you go. Tulip Time's Corbett Gardens are open 9.30am–4.30pm daily during the festival (11 September – 5 October 2026), with extended hours over the October long weekend.

More: Bradman Museum & International Cricket Hall of Fame ↗ · Tulip Time Festival ↗