Twentieth Wedding Anniversary ... a trip to the Grampians!

We had excellent cause to celebrate ... how often do you reach your twentieth wedding anniversary? Once in a lifetime, right? We wanted to do something to mark the occasion. A trip? Yes, a trip! So Dave and I took three days out, packed the cameras and drove to the Grampians, the amazing mountains east of the border...

We took several thousand pictures, and I'm just beginning to look through them. Whoa! Some of them are so amazing, they straddle the line between photography and art (and none of these you see here today have been into Photoshop. I cropped some, and gave the values a tweak, in Irfanview...)

We were only in Hall's Gap for two days ... I wish it could have been two years. I'd like to photograph the Grampians in all four seasons (apparently the native Aboriginal people recognize six seasons in this region, which they know as Gariwerd. It took an incoming Scotsman to realize how much these mountains reminded him of homeland and promptly rename them), and every time of day -- and also in both telephoto and macro ...

The truth is, I could go entirely nuts with the cameras in this place and not come home for years. I could also jump in the car and go back there every other week: it was magic! The only downside is that from Adelaide it's a 5.5 hour drive to get to Hall's Gap, even if you don't stop ... and if you don't stop, you will kill yourself with fatigue. The Duke's Highway is incredibly long, and the trucks on it are incredibly big, so...

Above: outbound via the Tailem Bend region. Middle: follow the train tracks due east, while listening to Freddie Mercury, K.D. Lang, Johnny Cash, Hobo Jim, Slim Dusty ... ABBA, Guardians of the Galaxy, Pirates of the Caribbean, Puss in Boots, anything, everything, and keep 'em coming, because they keep you awake! Then finally you cross the border, keep on going for another eon ... at last, hang a right at Horsham and run south into the Wartook Valley, and (bottom) ... there ... they ... are. The mountains rise right out of the Victorian pancake landscape (which doubled for Texas in the Ghostrider movie, incidentally).  Wooooo...

What can I say? Dave agrees with me that this is the best trip we ever did, and we'll do it again. It was "time of your life" stuff. He caught this shot of me, below, while I captured today's last image. I checked the time indexes on the photos, and they coincide:

Is that cool, or what?! That was dawn on March 27, just yesterday. Hall's Gap is down there, under the mist, which ran like a glacial river through the "Gap," which is a narrow pass through the mountain range.

I'll go through the photos gradually and get some posts together for the travel blog. I won't post them here, because this page is dedicated to art, but I will give you the links for the posts on the other blog, in case you're interested in Aus, or the Grampians, or photography, too...

So it's Happy Twentieth Wedding Anniversary to us!