Stowe

August 15th: A beautiful day in a beautiful town. Portsmouth New Hampshire has been around a long time and even a casual walk through its winding streets will reveal some buildings and houses built back in the early 1700s. The city has worked hard at incorporating its’ harbour and waterfront into the towns fabric so that the downtown spills effortlessly into all sorts of public parks and boardwalks and bike paths built along the waterfront. This harbour has been a working harbour for over three hundred years it once saw slave ships and was home to a great whaling fleet: it is still a working harbour which makes it all the more impressive that the town has been able to turn so much of this valuable land into public use. It’s a beautiful, well developed, historic city and worth a visit.
 

Tonights’ gig was an outdoor show in Prescott Park, down on the harbour. The forecast was for rain but it never came. We had a full day of sunshine and ambling. The show itself was part of a summer long series of free concerts in the park and the beautiful weather brought out a very large and enthusiastic crowd. We had a really fun show (despite a couple of train wrecks in the second set caused by me) and the audience came along for the ride, hell, they were even in the driver’s seat for a lot of it.

August 16th: Another easy and relaxing day…this time up the side of a mountain in northern Vermont. Days on the road don`t get much easier than this one: a beautiful new performing arts center, in the middle of one of those fabricated ski-resort “towns“. We just sat around and breathed in fresh air all day. Al went for a bike ride up the mountain, I checked out a small mountain stream that was gurgling nearby, it was crystal clear but a little too shallow to do any fishing at this time of year, but it was so crisp and clean looking I wanted to breathe it in, it almost looked fake, almost like it was generated to give a bit more authenticity to the “town”. The venue was a beautiful sounding and looking room, lots of money and thought has been poured into its’ construction. Add to all of this an enthusiastic audience and you have the makings of a very good day.