Day 23 - 17/02/12

I'm back, baby!!
My lord, you don't appreciate your health until it is cruelly taken away from you but today is a good day to be alive and feeling 100% better - woohoo!
Today I headed off to Echuca which is on the Murray River for the inaugural Riverboats Music Festival.
Apparently this is the first year of the festival (hence the "inaugural bit I guess) - Echuca had previously held an annual jazz festival but it was decided this year to re-vamp it and turn it into a more general music festival.
I got in at about 6pm and had a little bit of difficulty finding the caravan park as my gps could not locate the street it was on. I was however able to use the maps on my phone and eventually found it - what did people do in the days before gps and phones? Probably used their brains a bit more I guess!!
Freda seemed pretty happy with our pozzie:

Which was only about 15 metres from the mighty Murray:

I then went into town to check out the opening night of the Festival.
The setting was really nice, surrounded by massive gum trees, the river and a lagoon. With the sun setting and a gentle breeze, the conditions could not have been better to kick back and listen to some music.

Festival by day

Festival by night

I missed the first performer but caught the next group who were a 20 member African choir with energy to burn.
Then at about 9pm the night's main attraction, Vicka and Linda came on and they put on a pretty good show to a crowd who I reckon was nearing 3000 at a rough guess.

Vicka & Linda

I had not seen them live before but I was fairly familiar with their work with The Black Sorrows and other tv appearances.
Their band had a couple of what I would call, celebrity musos in You Am I guitarist Davey Lane and former Even (one of my fave Aussie bands of the 90's) singer songwriter Ash Naylor trading off guitar lines from either side of the stage.

Davey Lane

Ash Naylor

Linda did an encore on ukulele then it was time to go home - good to see some music and good to feel healthier again.