With the Covid-19 lockdown, the cinema was closed down. So at the end of May I was intrigued to see on the BBC News an article about drive-in cinema.
Obviously when I checked, the Bristol tickets were sold out probably down to the news article, I was a little disappointed. Even so I put my e-mail address down.
So was pleased when a day or so later the company behind the venture had released more tickets. I quickly went in and bought a “ticket” for Back to the Future. The ticket covered a car not the number of people in the car. The only downside was that we would need to wait until September.
In July we saw some cinemas reopen, so we did go and see The Empire Strikes Back as well as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It was nice to see these (old) films in the cinema.
Come September, and the date of the showing, we headed off to the drive-in cinema which was taking place at Bristol Airport. We were going to see Back to the Future.
As we drove through Banwell there were a couple of idiot BMW drivers who were driving rather badly. They were braking hard and accelerating sharply. In addition to driving too fast and overtaking dangerously. This wasn’t needed and made the drive to the airport slightly more stressful than it needed to be.
Having arrived at the Silver Parking at Bristol Airport, we drove to where they were showing the film. The staff were friendly and welcoming.
We were quite near the back, so the screen was smaller that I would have liked. It was certainly nothing like the huge screens I had seen in American films.
We had 6:30 tickets, but if you had the 6:00 tickets you would have been closer to the front and nearer the screen. In theory there were 7:00 tickets, but there were no cars behind us! I think some people had arrived early. If we were to do this again I would either try and buy the 6:00 tickets or arrive early.
There was a bit of time before the film started so we had our picnic. There was an option to buy food and drink and have it delivered to your car, but most of it wasn’t gluten free and it was also quite expensive – not too surprising it was a cinema!
For the picnic, I avoided sandwiches, we had gluten free sausages rolls (homemade), sausages, as well as fruit. There was carrot sticks and hummus too. I had some quiche and a scotch egg.
The film started. We really enjoyed the film. We had to use our radio to tune into the soundtrack, but every so often the car would turn the radio off, so we had to turn it back on again.
After the film was finished, we waited our turn and then drove out. What was nice the crew behind the whole thing were waving to everyone as they left. It was really dark as well. We then drove home.
Would we go again? Probably.
