In case you get keen on the dulcimer again, my partner has a travel dulcimer from Pete Staehling of Feather Dulcimer.  He has a chromatic Sparrow model, tuned to GDGG, and loves it to bits.  Having the chromatic frets opens up a lot more possibilities, and he’s playing as much or more than his Ron Ewing full-size dulcimer.  It took him a while to figure out what to do with the dulcimer, since they’re little-played in the UK and he had to teach himself (including doing some online music theory courses along the way), but now he finds it a very versatile and expressive instrument.  Pete’s dulcimers are designed as backpacking instruments, with features such as zither pins that make them more compact, but they still sound lovely.  It also holds its tuning very well, and arrived in tune with itself and only a semitone flat even though it came to us from the US in early spring.  It’s built in cherry with a sinker cypress top and maple fretboard, and is a lovely little thing.  There’s a huge amount you can do with mountain dulcimers.

With regard to wire-strung harps, they are smaller due to closer string spacing and there is repertoire for even the 19 string ones, but they require tuning every day, probably more often.  A friend lent me one, and I couldn’t work out how to get it to hold its tune.  A chap from the luthier told me that it should be tuned four times a day to begin with, and tuned twice each time.  I couldn’t keep up with the tuning schedule and it’s going back to my friend.

I’m still not sure a harp is a natural backpacking-and-campfire instrument, but carbon fibre ones have a reputation for surviving that sort of thing better, and some string types may work better for you as well.

When I mentioned on Facebook that I was thinking of taking up the harp again, another pair of friends lent me their harp.  25 strings, bigger than you’d expect (no way could you travel with it), crap levers (the bottom one fell off), soundbox splits, all sorts of problems.  I was enjoying messing around with it anyway, but the range was horribly limiting, and I couldn’t really get anywhere until I started renting a decent student harp, the Camac Hermine.  I’m about to change that over for a Starfish Glencoe while I wait for my own harp to be built, since the Camac has too low a string tension for me.  People frequently complain about the range being limiting on smaller harps – you’re often advised to learn on a 34 string and then figure out if you can manage a smaller one and what you plan to do with it – and many people don’t get on well with a partially-levered harp either.