Radio Springs Hotel, Lyonville, Victoria, Australia -- Amazing Place

Adrian and I were playing our dulcimers recently at the Radio Springs Hotel near Daylesford, in Lyonville, Victoria, when a couple of amateur photographers asked us to allow them to take pictures.  We agreed and let the photographers direct us on where to sit.  Derrick Lee took this picture and a few others and said he would mail copies to Adrian.  I think it's pretty cool that Adrian actually received a couple of photos in the mail!  The original picture is not digital.....and I am 10,000 miles away from my trusty scanner.....so I took a picture of this picture to share the talent of Derrick Lee and to say thank you, publicly.  There's a photo exhibition going on nearby.  

Derrick Lee stopped at the Radio Springs Hotel during his time involved with the Ballarat International Foto Biennalle; and after listening and watching us play music in the hotel lobby, he asked for permission to set us up for a photograph.  So, this picture is mostly real....with a little bit of staged-effect.  Adrian and I had been playing music inside the hotel, and we were asked to move to the bench outside.....so we sat down outside on the porch bench, where instructed, and started playing music again while the cameras clicked away in the natural lighting, and the pictures were taken without camera flashes.

Adrian is playing a Simerman dulcimer, and I am playing a "jocimer" that was built by my friend Bob Magowan in Memphis, Tennessee.  In 2007 Adrian bought the jocimer in Memphis and returned to Australia with it.  This picture reminds me of many ways I have been blessed in the last few years.  Here I am in Australia, blogging about playing a Memphis-made jocimer -- a "one-off" instrument made by a fine luthier and friend of mine -- at a delightful place, called the Radio Springs Hotel, which is owned by kind and generous Australians who are my newly found friends.  I am amazed.