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 in an entry a couple weeks ago.

The other, somewhat more exciting news concerns the Road Island Diner in Oakley, Utah, which I first wrote about just over one year ago. This is the authentic 1940s-vintage prefab diner that was shipped cross-country from the east coast to a small town at the edge of the Uinta Mountains. To cut to the chase, the renovation is complete and it opened for business this weekend. Details are here. According to the linked article, it’s one of only about 1,200 diners left in the country.

I’ve also found an official website 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 authentic. The Trib 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.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Utah attraction if there wasn’t some 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.

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…

One final note: if you’re interested in reading those articles, don’t hesitate: in only a few days, the Tribune will drop them behind a pay-wall… I really wish they’d follow the New York Times‘ example and quit doing that…