Mission Not So Accomplished

As promised, here is the report on our drive-in movie adventure. It didn't go as smoothly as planned.

The drive-in itself was nice. It had a lot of rules though. Headlights had to be turned off before we entered the theater (so you don't shine your lights onto the screen.) I was a bit worried about this, since our car has running lights that never turn off. But the girl at the box office told me how to disable that, by turning off the car, putting the emergency brake up one click and starting 'er back up. There were a lot of other rules, about wearing shoes, about where tall cars (SUVs, etc.) had to go, stuff like that.

The thing is, those rules were drummed into our heads. The website had them. The pamphlet we got at the box office (along with a garbage bag for our trash) had them. And the owner got on the speakers before the movie started and went over them again in excruciating detail, complete with frequent explanation for why such and such rule exists. He did it in a friendly, familiar kind of way, but still... It was a bit much. It didn't help that the guy had an annoyingly nasal voice.

Otherwise, it was a nice place. The problem was with PG.

The odds were stacked in our favor; PG hardly took a nap at daycare, a place that has been tiring her out a lot, even with a good nap, lately. So I was optimistic that she would sleep through both movies. That she could barely stay awake during dinner made me all the more optimistic.

Sadly, she got a second wind between dinner and time to leave and ended up not falling asleep until we were almost at the drive-in. She stayed asleep until the theater owner came on and did his spiel about the rules and how awesome his theater is. She didn't like his voice either.

So M took her out of her car seat and held her on her lap in the front seat. There's a chance PG might have fallen back asleep during the opening cartoon (the one that comes with Wall-E,) but Nasal Guy came back on after the cartoon and put an end to that. PG wouldn't get anywhere close to sleeping again during the remainder of our stay there.

It didn't help that it was a hot, humid night, especially in the car, and absolutely inside PG's car seat inside the car. One of the many rules of the drive-in was that you can't leave your car running (because "CARBON MONOXIDE is POISON,") so we couldn't run the AC. This proved to be especially brutal when PG started fussing, and I rolled up the windows to spare our neighbors the noise.

We did stick around for all of Wall-E, but neither of us paid close attention to it. We kept our attention on keeping PG from fussing. Luckily, she found the movie and the people watching it interesting, so it was just a matter of walking to different points around the car, so she could see everything and everybody from a different perspective. At one point, she said "Wa-zis?" so I explained the concept of the drive-in to her, on the off-chance that she was, indeed, asking "What's this?"

It was obvious that PG wasn't going to sleep as long as we stayed at the drive-in, so we left before The Dark Knight started. That was a shame, since M still has yet to see it, and we would have gotten two movies for our $8 each (three, if we had stuck around for the 1 AM showing of Journey To The Center of The Earth, which was never in the cards for oh so many reasons.) On the other hand, we were both exhausted, so PG probably did us a favor. There will be other weekends for Dark Knight.

I'd like to go to the drive-in again sometime, but not until PG is old enough to watch the movies with us and behave. Unless we can find a babysitter that doesn't mind us being out to all hours of the night.