The MacDonnell Ranges has been a Mecca to the artist inside me for all my adult life.  Magnificent, red and blue violets, Pilbara red, red and green gold and soft grey green and indigo, sigh, J, and I am floating on a high thinking in colours. The picture above is of  my painting of the twin ghost gums in the Western MacDonnell ranges.

The Eastern MacDonnell Ranges is a landscape of grandeur, rocky gorges and Aboriginal history and rock art.  There are wonderful bush camp grounds, gem fossicking locations and old ghost towns to explore

The Western MacDonnell Rangers are more frequented by visitors, prettier, more gorges to visit and some incredible sights to see, so close to Alice Springs.  I have obtained better photos in other years, as it was overcast for most of our visit this time, even Mt Sonda, had her beautiful head in a cloud so i’ll illustrate with some of my art work I painted there in the last visit as well as my photos from my visit this year.

As usual we found a mountain top to set up home base on and watched the sun rise and set , walked along the ridges and up and down hills J in areas where the dog was allowed, then into a warm bed  with woollen doona,  when that  camp fire is put out and you are reminded that winter has started and as much as the days in the centre, lovely and mild, the nights are cold.   On winter nights like this, I love our revolutionary designed eco-tourer caravan while it folds down for towing, it has hard insulated walls, not canvas sides like the pop tops, the best of the solid wall construction vans with the economy and ease of towing of the pop tops and faster and easier to put up that our previous much loved AVan  ALiner, one of those cute triangular vans.    While I don’t believe there is ever the perfect caravan or RV to suit everyone, there s always some degree of compromise needed when choosing a van.

 Reg and I both have a love for  great design, and  fantastic use of every little bit of space within a van and our Eco tourer van is the off highway model, with its own en suit and it’s fully self sufficient with solar power we even watch TV or a DVD at night and use our lights for hours just from the battery charged by the sun even n overcast days we generate enough power to live in the bush or on top of our favourite, MacDonnell Ranges mountain, with all the mod cons we could need.   While alone in a remote location in these beautiful ranges  with no need to respect our neighbour and be quiet, we watched old musical comedy DVD’s  and our remote area of the ranges rang with the music of  ‘South Pacific’ and ‘Oliver’, once it became too cold to stay outside.

Now we are back closer to neighbouring campers and vanners, we become readers, writers, card players and tranquil star gazers again and marvel that everyone else around us is being as quiet and respectful of tier neighbours peace and quiet, also.

 

Ah it’s a great lifestyle this gray with an a for active, nomad, life J