June 25: Blue Grass Drive-In Theater, Blue Grass IA

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It’s Day 176 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. I jogged back from Galesburg IL, north across the border, past Davenport to the Blue Grass Drive-In Theater just west of Blue Grass IA. The drive only took about an hour, and the backpedalling was worth it to make sure I was at a drive-in with a Sunday night show.

The Blue Grass is one of those perfect modern success stories of a drive-in. After years of NIMBY obstacles, Randy Lorenz finally found an approved site, and in 2014, he built his drive-in.

There are just a few drive-ins with screens back-to-back, with one tower and two projection booths. Lorenz took that to the next level, building a a four-screen cube in the center of his complex. Only two are active now, but he’s got room to easily expand.

According to The Des Moines Register, Lorenz had planned to called it the Reel-to-Reel Drive In. (In fact, its Facebook page is still facebook.com/reeltoreel/.) Then came the change to digital projection. “I have two 35mm projectors in my garage that are basically paperweights right now,” he said. “They’re pretty much worthless.”

Once again we turn to WQAD, the Quad Cities’ News Leader, and this time they show the right way to promote a drive-in during a morning show – they visited the Blue Grass in the pre-dawn hours before the drive-in’s opening night this year. On the other hand, WQAD’s page on that story had a video from a projection booth (above), one from the concession stand, and one from the storm shelter(!), but nothing online that showed what the movie looked like on the screen. Maybe it was a big tease, or maybe the full morning show included that segment.

It was nice to have a choice of movies, so I was able to catch the latest Transformers entry, which is just as noisy and drive-in-worthy as the rest of them.

Miles Today / Total:  66 / 22489 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: Transformers: The Last Knight / 92

Nearby Restaurant: Unless you want a Subway sandwich or convenience store food, the best restaurant by default in Blue Grass IA is in an unassuming building downtown, The Corner Grill. Fortunately, it’s pretty good. I enjoyed my grilled salmon salad since I was trying to eat healthy on alternating days, at least. Even better, there are lots of TVs and a bar. I’m glad to have found this place.

Where I Virtually Stayed: There just aren’t any hotels that close to the Blue Grass. I ended up heading almost 10 miles to the Comfort Inn in Davenport. My king bed room had all the standard amenities and good wifi. Breakfast in the morning was the standard Comfort Inn fare – a few hot options to go with continental breakfast – with a fireplace in the lobby. All of this for a pretty good price.

Only in Blue Grass: Ten miles north of the Blue Grass is the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, adjacent to the self-proclaimed World’s Largest Truckstop. That truckstop’s founder, Bill Moon, had a passion for collecting antique trucks and other trucking memorabilia, and the collection is truly amazing. The truckstop has a full food court, a buffet, and a full-service restaurant that served me the best biscuits and gravy that I’ve eaten in decades. Definitely worth the stop!

Next stop: McHenry Outdoor Theater, McHenry IL.

June 24: Blue Moonlight Drive-In Theater, Galesburg IL

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Blue Moonlight Drive-In concession stand and screen at night with starts circling above

photo © DepositPhotos / sgtphoto

It’s Day 175 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Thanks to a couple of interstates, the fastest route from Sterling IL to the Blue Moonlight Drive-In Theater, just west of Galesburg, took only about an hour and a half to drive.

The Blue Moonlight is the setting for one of the finest drive-in photos I’ve ever seen, a photo I licensed from DepositPhotos.com. (It’s what I used to illustrate a deep question from last year: How do you define a drive-in theater?) If you click on the photo to see it at higher resolution, you can count the bricks on the old screen and see some playground equipment in the darkness below. To get that detail at night, then combine it with the time-lapse stars circling overhead, that’s just wonderful.

According to Cinema Treasures, the Blue Moonlight opened as the Galesburg Drive-In in 1949. Some time after 1980, it closed. In the mid-1980s, the Carlsons bought the place and used it for an antique tractor restoration business. They began restoring the drive-in in 2004 and re-opened it in mid-2005, now calling it the Blue Moonlight Drive-In. It ran first-run movies for a while, but now shows older films, suggesting that it hasn’t converted to digital projection.

The video embedded above is a 2014 story from WQAD, the Quad Cities’ News Leader, about a local non-profit hosting a “Haunted Drive-In” attraction. It only shows a bit of what the Blue Moonlight was like a couple of years ago, and the non-profit’s Facebook page is gone, but you know how hard it is for me to resist sharing almost any drive-in video.

Tonight’s movie was free, and it snapped my streak of consecutive Cars 3 viewings. The film was a bit of kiddie fare from 1990, Jetsons: The Movie. The Blue Moonlight makes its money at the concession stand; keeping the movie free just makes it more obvious. But the food prices are great – $6 for a truly huge tenderloin sandwich, $6 for a grocery bag(!) full of popcorn, and sodas for just a buck. What a deal!

Miles Today / Total:  94 / 22423 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: Jetsons: The Movie / 91

Nearby Restaurant: Saturday night is a great time for beer, so I sought out the Iron Spike Brewing Company. A lot of those small brewpubs like to outdo each other in hoppiness, but the hefeweizen here suited me. For lunch, I tried the chipotle black bean burger with a side of veggies, just so I wouldn’t feel as guilty when I had be tenderloin sandwich for a drive-in dinner at the Blue Moonlight.

Where I Virtually Stayed: More and more, I find that the Holiday Inn Express is becoming one of my favorite hotel chains. Their Galesburg location is one of their newer hotels, and I was greeted by warm cookies in the afternoon. I love the pancake conveyor belt at breakfast (and those cinnamon rolls), and my king bed room had all of the standard conveniences. It’s just a modern, clean, comfortable place.

Only in Galesburg: Just south of Galesburg, in a street median adjacent to a city park, Abingdon IL features an 83-foot totem pole, called the tallest “east of the Rockies”. The town commissioned an Illinois State University in 1969 to build the world’s tallest totem pole to attract tourists. A few years later, a taller Canadian totem pole was built, followed by even taller poles in the Pacific northwest, prompting the geographic qualifier.

Next stop: Blue Grass Drive-In Theater, Blue Grass IA.

June 23: Midway Drive In Theatre, Sterling IL

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It’s Day 174 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. It took only about an hour and a half to drive east from Delmar IA to the Midway Drive In Theatre northeast of Sterling IL.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe that every Midway drive-in was named for being about halfway between two cities. For this one, those cities are Sterling and Dixon IL. It opened in 1950, probably by John Kontos and L. G. Rorer, and claims to have the oldest standing screen in the state.

Mike and Mia Kerz, founders of the Flashback Weekend Movie Conventions in Rosemont, have owned the Midway since 2007, and they’re proud of their restoration work. As the Midway’s About page put it, “From the classic retro ‘spaceship’ ticket booth, to the full service concession stand, a trip to the Midway is like entering a time capsule to the 1950’s.” You can see the playground equipment in front of the screen in the YouTube drone video I’ve embedded above.

During Honda’s Project Drive-In voting in 2013, a string of horror film luminaries encouraged voters to choose the Midway to win a digital projector. Svengoolie, host of a weekly movie series on MeTV, posted the request on his web site. Robert Englund, George Romero and others added their support in a YouTube video for the Midway. In the end, Honda awarded the projectors to other drive-ins, but the Kerzs were able to switch to digital by the end of the 2014 season.

With all the single-screen drive-ins out there, I should have expected this would happen at some point. I’m really happy that my planning, combined with the onset of summer, has given me 22 consecutive active nights this month, but this is the fifth straight night watching Cars 3. It occurs to me that it’s an odd movie in that there’s no true antagonist. There are a few complaining jerks, but no character ever tries to prevent Lightning McQueen from reaching his goals.

Miles Today / Total:  71 / 22329 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: Cars 3 / 90

Nearby Restaurant: Over in Dixon, the home of comfort food is Flynnie’s Diner. I had a healthy breakfast here, honest, with an egg white omelette with spinach, green peppers, mushrooms and onions. The potato cakes that came with it were probably healthy too. And I had to try a fresh cinnamon roll.

Where I Virtually Stayed: Since Sterling didn’t really have any hotels, I went in the other direction from the Midway to Dixon, where there’s a Comfort Inn. My room had the now-usual set of microwave, mini-fridge, coffee maker, and wifi. The indoor pool had a small slide and a mural of the beach. Breakfast had the usual waffle iron and Comfort Inn standards plus some scrambled eggs and fruit. Pretty good deal!

Only in Sterling Dixon: There’s a replica of the Berlin Wall, complete with graffiti and a statue of an East German armed guard, at the Reagan Peace Park here. Dixon is Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home, and a Bulgarian immigrant donated the Wings of Peace and Freedom sculpture to the City of Dixon.

Next stop: Blue Moonlight Drive-In Theater, Galesburg IL.