website<\/a> for the Road Island that includes an extensive photo gallery of the renovation. In classic-car terminology, it was a complete “frame off restoration,” i.e., it was stripped right down to the bare bones and rebuilt from the ground up. It looks fabulous now, like a time traveler from the Greatest Generation plopped down right here in the 21st Century. I’m very pleased to see that the new owner went for authenticity after all. (I heard a rumor a while back that he’d planned a huge, two-story addition that would’ve completely overshadowed the original structure, but that was either untrue, or someone talked him out of it.) Of course, it’s not entirely<\/i> authentic. The Trib<\/i> article notes that the there are flat-screen TVs, which I could’ve lived without (I realized today just how ubiquitous video displays have become in our society, and how distracting they frequently are; it’d be nice to escape them once in a while), and the tabletop jukeboxes are described as “remote controls for iPods in the back,” but I guess you can only go so far in recreating another time period.<\/p>\nOh, and it wouldn’t be a Utah attraction if there wasn’t some<\/i> element of cheesiness to it: all the employees have been given “diner names.” Oy. What is it with this state anyway? It’s like people just can’t help but find some way of being cutesy.<\/p>\n
Still, I’m pretty eager to try the place out, even with TVs and cutesy-ness. The Girlfriend and I plan to take a little road trip within the next couple of weeks…<\/p>\n
One final note: if you’re interested in reading those articles, don’t hesitate: in only a few days, the Tribune<\/i> will drop them behind a pay-wall… I really wish they’d follow the New York Times<\/i>‘ example and quit doing that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past couple of days, I’ve noticed some items in the Tribune that may be of interest to my local (or formerly local) readers. The first is a feature story about the handful of drive-in theaters that still operate in Utah; it focuses primarily on the Motor Vu in Erda, which I briefly mentioned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-color"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}