On Wednesday, I went to Chinatown with Katie and Kathy and we got our Aura photos taken. (From L to R: Kathy, me, Katie). Thanks for coming down to visit! Happy September 2016!
Awww, travel buddies! It was magical that I got to bring these two people together! Thanks for making my Wilhelm Reich Roadtrip dream come true, you two!
she unlocks the classroom and i go over to he car to change into pants. it was 90 degrees in portsmouth where we picked katie up, it's now 58 degrees and misting rain. she comes running out of the classroom, back over to her car and drives up to the chain to unlock the roadway up to the mountain top on which the rest of the building of the wilhelm reich trust overlook the lake below.
john hands me his giant ring of keys and i'm excited that i get to drive. i'm a little sore from driving the previous day, but the museum is only 10 minutes away. i try to leave the motel by way of a parking lot with no exit. i make one of the many u-turns that we've made on the trip due to not knowing where we're going and phone, map, gps problems. it is both funny and frustrating at the same time. but mostly funny.
an older local couple of mainers strolls past looking at us with poker-faced curiosity. i wonder if she can smell john's mary jane and wonder if what she thinks of it if she can. she catches me watching her and i give her a big genuine smile. she has won me over with her new england poker face. she sees my smile is genuine and smiles back. i see her husband notice my smile peripherally but he doesn't turn his eyes or head to investigate further. not out of unfriendliness, more of a no-nonsense hurry to get to the motel office to get some kind of thing squared away.
Which included fucking around on....THE BONGO BOARD! My dad and his brother grew up spending his summers at a different lakehouse with Stephen and his brothers where they would get drunk and see who could stay balanced on the Bongo Board the longest.
That's Cousin Kevin Crowell (who taught me how to water ski when I was a wee lad!) ferrying us over to the island for a small memorial service and burying of the ashes.
As soon as I got into Strafford, I dropped my stuff off at the hotel that my parents were staying in and then immediately headed over to Portsmith to meet up with Cousin Katie (who you may remember from such long-ago diary entries as 1997's Visiting Boston With Cousin Katie, here's us with her friend Erin.
After food we went back to the loft Katie's staying at in the "Button Factory." (For those of you not "in the know" with Portsmith, the Button Factory is huge, former, yup you guessed it, Button Factory that they've converted into Artist in Residence lofts. It's basically the Williamsburg of NH, ya dig?)
Here we are at Ciao Bella on Newbury Street. We went to eat there because my ex-roomate Jen works there. The food was really good, but it gave me a real pain in the wallet. This is the same restaurant where we would later experience the "Sketchy Wife's Credit Card Incident." (don't ask...)
