Thanks guys, am showing my ignorance. I had convinced myself that the JY-MCU was BLE (its not) and that that one could use Blynk without access to the internet. Well, you live and learn.
Bottom line, Blynk won’t work for me, instead of setting up a BT/BLE link between an arduino and a smartphone or building a local server (interesting idea though!), I’ll go back to what I know how to do and use Xbee between two arduinos and figure out how to get it into the cloud later.
Thanks for all the help here and good luck! I hope I can come back some day and use Blynk, the concept is pretty cool.