19th – 21st Sept: Days 164 – 166
In the end hurricane José was not as bad as all that, and our premature departure from Newport was, in retrospect, not really necessary. But you know what they say: better a storm in a teacup than trying to make tea as the side of your RV is ripped off by 100 mile an hour winds. We located our next home, a small RV park on a river in Portland, Connecticut which was part of a sizeable marina. The facilities were questionable but the sites were nice, flat concrete pads and it was quiet and wooded. It was the time of year when people start pulling their boats out of the water for winter using a huge motorised cradle. It gets so cold here that anything left in the water gets crushed by the ice. Even the floating docks get pulled out.
On the surface this might seem like a random place to stop. But, oh no. Nothing random about our visit to this town. One of our favourite TV shows is a car show called ‘Chasing Classic Cars’ and it is hosted by an affable chap with an excellent moustache called Wayne Carini. He locates, buys, restores and sells classic cars for himself, but also acts as a broker for very wealthy clients, going to top end auctions and doing valuations for estates etc. Great show. His base for his business and for the TV show is a shop and yard called F40 Motorsport in, you guessed it, Portland CT. It is on the main road into town only about half a mile from our camp.
We had a foray on the bikes across the river to the neighbouring town of Middletown where we found a great authentic diner for lunch and then took ourselves up to F40 Motorsports, chasing Wayne Carini.
The TV show is exported to 30 different countries so I imagine that fans and car nuts from all over the world do exactly the same as we were doing: just call in to see if they can look around the showroom and perhaps bump into the man himself. However, I can be fairly confident that almost none of them do it by bicycle.
We arrived and wandered into the small showroom which was manned by a chap called Mike. He was politely welcoming, encouraged us to look around and commiserated with us that we had JUST missed the boss who had gone for the day. As we signed the visitors book he dutifully gave us an A4 flyer with a promotional photo of Wayne.
There was a small but perfectly formed display of mint condition cars in the showroom including a 1934 Bentley, a Ferrari California, a Dino, two classic Porsches and a very sexy Mercedes 300SL Gullwing. It was cool to be there, but we were a teeny bit disappointed to have missed the man himself.
Our disappointment was soon to be a distant emotion though. A combination of us being marvellously interesting and beautiful people and having arrived by bicycle meant we got chatting in a bit more depth to Mike. I imagine that he must have been having a quiet afternoon as he uttered the words ‘I don’t usually do this for visitors, but do you want a look at the cars in the sheds and workshop?’ Yes please. Yes. And he let me sit in the Mercedes in the showroom.
$1.6 million of me looking very cool. An hour later we emerged from the backroom tour thinking that that had been a very worthy consolation for not meeting Wayne Carini himself. The highlight was seeing a very rare Ferrari Daytona Spyder that had featured prominently on one of the show’s episodes. So, we were happy campers. Quite literally.
Otherwise our 2 day stay here was very lazy. It was warm and disgustingly humid so we sat in watching TV. The only channel we could get was the ‘Dick Wolf’ channel, so we watched back to back Law and Order and Criminal Intent for HOURS!