Lily's Snack Bar forever

The deceptively straightforward Fingers drinking guide to Boone, North Carolina

My wife and I bought a new car recently. It’s an electric vehicle, and it emits a loud, steady chime from a speaker under the hood when you put it in reverse. Apparently, this is a regulatory requirement for new EVs designed to alert nearby pedestrians that the relatively quiet automobile gliding towards them is just as capable of backing over them as an internal combustion vehicle?

Anyway, it’s an incredibly embarrassing noise, so when my wife and I pulled into the packed, one-way parking lot outside Lily’s Snack Bar on a recent Friday night, I quickly opted against trying to back into the only available spot. The young crowd assembled on the spartan, cracked-cement patio was chock-a-block with piercings and tattoos and get-ups that made me feel like the police, and I wasn’t about to blast them with our regrettable siren. We looped the block, found a spot out of earshot behind Appalachian State University’s convocation center, then tacked back across U.S. 321 to the bar.