More than 300 fashionable vehicles will line Main Street and the Main Plaza Saturday as the third year of the Hill Country Mile Rod Run is upon us.
Formerly known as the Key To The Hills Rod Run, the format changed and received a facelift of sorts after its 36-year run. The new name included an expanded entry field, allowing any American- made vehicle prior to 1985 to enter.
Previously, the Rod Run took only vehicles made in 1949 and earlier.
“It’s a huge party,” said Josh Mazour, owner of Cibolo Creek Brewing Company and one of the Hill Country Mile Rod Run organizers. “It used to be a one-day event. But now, the street is closed on Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., but we have events Friday and Sunday as well.”
Friday previously was set-up for the all-day Saturday event.
“Last year on Friday we were setting things up and had a band out there,” Mazour said. “It wasn’t really planned, but it became something last year. So, this year, we’re just going to embrace that. We have two metal bands from Austin that are coming down Friday night.”
The free event, BYOB, is open to the public, with food vendors on site.
The bands from Austin are Duel, and Mean Mistreater. Duel’s bio calls the band’s “menacing and brutally old school ... cutting right to the bone with heavy, deep groove and blistering tone.”
Mean Mistreater, formed in Austin in 2023, takes on a heavy metal stance, and “stands out in a crowded genre, ready to carve out their own place in the heavy metal landscape.”
“It’s heavy metal music, which I think is cool,” Mazour said. “It’s kind of fun to change things, to bring new life into the event.”
Mazour said the Friday night event will also bring back a bit of nostalgia — cruisin’.
“I think you’ll see a lot of cars cruising up and down Main Street on Friday night,” he said, “which goes back to the whole nostalgia of fun times.”
Sunday features what Mazour calls the “Reliability Run,” where car owners meet in the square and take off on a drive that meanders through the Hill Country into several smaller towns and villages — taking “the show on the road,” past residents who may not have had an opportunity to join them on Saturday in downtown Boerne.
The “reliability” part? “It’s about two hours of driving. That’s why we call it the reliability run, you just kinda hope your car makes it,” he joked.
Mazour encourages attendees to stop and talk with the car owners, who have put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into their machines.
“Everybody wants to talk about their car,” Mazour said. “This is an opportunity for them to come out and show it off and do that.
“We kind of run the gamut. There are old-school hot rods, you’ll get late ‘70s Ford trucks, muscle cars, and everything in between,” he said.
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