Room rates for a motel in Vermont and one in Colorado include drive-in movies guests can watch from bed.
FAIRLEE, Vt. -- Who needs a car at the drive-in theater? Just go straight to bed.
The Fairlee Motel & Drive-In Theater combines the best of roadside America. Drive in, and you have your classic outdoor experience. Check in, and a picture window and NuTone speaker give you the same show from your king-size bed -- with air conditioning and no mosquitoes. Please don't wipe popcorn butter on the sheets.
Someone taller than about 5-foot-8 can even watch the movie from the shower, through the tiny bathroom window.
The Fairlee is one of at least two drive-in motels in the United States. Another is the Best Western Movie Manor in Monte Vista, Colo. The Movie Manor claims to be unique, but according to the motels' histories, the Fairlee's combination came first, in 1960.
The Fairlee sits along Route 5 in a pretty stretch of eastern Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from New Hampshire. The short drive off Interstate Hwy. 91 brings rolling green hills, starched white wooden churches and wilting red barns.
At dusk, the fireflies come out. Groups of young campers arrive in vans from nearby Lake Fairlee and spread blankets near the screen. The Fairlee has daily shows after July 4 and double features on weekends, attracting between 100 and 400 cars on Fridays and Saturdays. The movie season lasts from May 1 to Columbus Day.
It's a family business. One young son works the gate and watches for extra people being smuggled in under blankets. Another son helps in the concession stand with the mother, Erika Trapp, dispensing Creamsicles and $2 popcorn. The hamburgers are made with Angus beef from the family's New Hampshire farm. Also for sale: Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and bug repellent.
Motel guests who need a snack must make the short walk outside. The concession stand does not deliver. But rooms come with mini-refrigerators and microwaves.
Not everybody watches from a blanket on the ground or from inside their hotel. Drivers also haul in old sofas, porch swings, inflatable pools. The Trapps send a chaperone around the field from time to time. Sometimes, by the end, people must be woken up and told to go.
The novelty of watching a drive-in movie from a motel room is worth a look for most people, but just a look, Peter Trapp says. "It's like going to New York City: 'Oh, there's the Empire State Building, that's nice.'"
Most people, he adds, "don't watch the movie, they just watch the people when they come. Then they watch the 100-plus channels on TV."
