Blowing Rock and the Movies

Blowing Rock is nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains. Being a mountain town, it is quite temperate. I lived in nearby Asheville for a year, and I found the climate to be consistently pleasant; the temperature was modulated by the Smokies.  Being the hippie town that it is, you can wear your tie-dye hemp shirts almost year round. Unless you are a business person; then you wear your tie-dyed hemp three piece suit. 

Blowing Rock is less of a hippie town than Asheville, but still beautiful and temperate. It is smaller and more quaint than Asheville.  In January, average high is 39 F. In July, it is 76. Lows are 21 and 59, respectively, and those are the extremes of temperature for BR. It was first settled by Native Americans, of course. As far as European-descent colonists, settling began just a few decades before the civil war. Interest in the area picked up after the civil war, as a vacation spot with cooling elevation in the summer for people from nearby Brevard and other nearby NC towns. Early settlers turned their homes into boarding houses and as demand outstripped their space, they eventually built hotels. The first hotel in Blowing Rock was the Watauga Hotel, built in 1884.

 

Blowing Rock offers dozens of cute shops and original restaurants with outstanding food. They have numerous parks, zip lines, nearby skiing, hiking, camping, bears (did I mention bears?) and wineries. They have a monthly  art in the park event for 6 months in the summer, and movies in park. They have their own brewery. Blowing Rock is also where I discovered local soda. Just when you thought all soda pops were multinational conglomerate owned sugar water death crystal factories of doom, I discovered two amazing family owned soda pop companies on the same trip; one in Kentucky ( a future but soon post) and one in NC.

They have a summertime series called Movies in the Park. This reminds me of the drive-in theaters that I used to visit as a teenager, which reminds me of an incident involving smuggling extra guys in the trunk. There is nothing devious about the Blowing Rock Movies in the Park, however. The films are all family friendly and sponsored by local business.  This summer, they showed Hotel Transylvania 2, The Grinch, The Mighty Ducks, and The Never-ending Story.

They should work harder at matching sponsors to themes, however. I cannot find any connection between the theme of the movie and the local company sponsor for it. For example, if Cujo was showing, the nearest St. Bernard breeders would sponsor. Or McCormick's Meat Tenderizer could sponsor the Hannibal Lecter movies.  I am only mildly offended that they have not taken my suggestions with any serious consideration. Maybe I should mail them some meat tenderizer in an envelope to remind them of my idea.

 

Which brings me back to smuggling of teenagers. Back then, as you probably know, we paid by the person. So of course, teens going to movies would smuggle extra passengers in the trunk. Or at least we did. And I was the first in my posse to have a car. And I was one of the two skinniest guys… so guess who got smuggled in the trunk in my own car?  Me and Chuck. 

So then the problem became ... Where to sit to watch the movie?  I sat on the ground, with the grill of my car as a backrest. The only problem with this was that we had gone to see the original Halloween movie. It was a new release.  I never really liked scary slasher movies. And I didn’t know who Jamie Lee Curtis was at the time or I probably would have been paying more attention to her. Anyway, this one bozo, Jerry, sat in the driver's seat of MY car. He had seen the movie before. So at all the worst most suspenseful scenes, he would lay on the horn. And I would jump ten feet in the air. I eventually went to a picnic table for a coke and a burger and quit watching the film.

Well, nothing like this will happen at the Movies in the Park in Blowing Rock. (or will it? … creepy Vincent Price voice.. MWhahahahaha).

More importantly, I am no longer smuggling teenagers in my car.

The peacefulness of Blowing Rock is majestic. The beauty, surreal. My blog posts and pictures barely give you a sense of it. Come spend time in Blowing Rock, and you will never want to leave.