Unexpected day trip alert! I drove out to Covina today to see if their IKEA had the computer desk I’ve been looking for since last week. It was looking like a boring early afternoon drive until I pulled off the 210-East onto North Azusa Avenue (Route-39) and noticed a small sign with an arrow pointing eastward that read, “San Dimas 4 Miles.” I knew at that moment my day was going to get a lot more excellent!
There were no desks at IKEA. There won’t be any in the style I need for another week at any locations in Southern California. So that sucks. I started driving back along Route-39 when I decided that I was going to diverge from my path and go on a spur-of-the-moment Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure tour. After a brief stop at In-N-Out for some fuel, I turned onto Arrow Highway and headed towards San Dimas.
I stopped in La Verne and searched online for some places I might be able to visit, but I soon learned that a lot of the really cool filming locations used during the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure shoot were located in Arizona. This includes the infamous Circle-K, the mall and the bowling alley.
My first stop on the tour was Raging Waters — which by the way wasn’t even in the fucking movie, because they used a water park in Arizona as “Waterloo” — where Napoleon supposedly hung out when he came to San Dimas in the ’80s. I’m pretty sure the park is closed until summer. That didn’t stop me from trying my best to sneak onto the property to take some photographs. I drove towards the main parking lot at the water park, slowly creeping along to capture some images of the surrounding mountains as I descended into the canyon where Raging Waters is.
The parking lot was closed and there was a sign propped in front of it declaring the park off limits to anyone. Lucky for me, someone left the gate to the parking lot open, so I just drove in casually and started to look for a place to park. That’s when I noticed a security vehicle sitting on the far side of the lot. An old man in uniform got out of the vehicle and started towards me as I was making my way up the stairs to “Paradise Ridge.” He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him the gate was open and I was from out of town, and I was writing an article on San Dimas tourist attractions so I was hoping to take some photographs of the property. That didn’t really fly with the security guard, who told me to immediately return to my car and exit the way that I came. He said something about the property being off limits, to which I should have responded by claiming that, “Open gates are a welcome sign,” but I didn’t want to extend my stay in San Dimas any longer (especially if I was to be locked up for trespassing) so I rolled slowly out of the lot. Instead of leaving, I circled all the way back around the property to see if I could sneak in again, but the gate had been closed and it was topped with razor wire. So, I just continued on my way.
As sundown approached I decided to drive a couple miles to San Dimas high school for a little late afternoon stroll. Naturally, most of the interior shots at the school were actually filmed in Arizona, which made my going to SDHS pretty much pointless. I just wanted to see if they had a cool football field, or maybe if I could snap a shot of the football team practicing. Is football season in California also a fall/winter sport, or do they do it in the spring here? Whatever.
By the way, is it illegal to be a guy in his mid 20s walking onto schoolgrounds anymore? After all this 9/11 and Columbine shit I would think that people who aren’t either attending a high school or working at a high school are prohibited from loitering on the property. I elected not to think about trivialities like “laws” and decided to just park my car in the school parking lot and search for the football field. Hell, I didn’t even know if there was a football field. Maybe I would discover that San Dimas High was like the University Of Vermont — sans football team.
The first thought I had as I made my way up the front stairs of the school was, “Jesus Christ, I feel like a fucking pedophile.” Like I just said, I don’t really feel like anyone who is older than a high school senior doesn’t really have any right to be on the grounds of a high school unless they work there. So you can imagine how my insides were twisted up as I saw all these tiny munchkin children standing around waiting for their parents to pick them up from whatever after school activities they’d just completed. I felt even worse clutching my crummy cell phone camera, because with my luck I’d be arrested for snapping photographs of underaged girls as I was trying to immortalize a school mural, or one of the sports facilities. Speaking of which — there is a football field! It’s in horrible shape, maybe because of the rain, maybe because it is currently under construction, but it looks like shit. I was hoping for some kind of epic monument to Bill and Ted, but there was none. I figured if SDHS football was worth such lofty praise, maybe they’d have some insanely opulent football field, like the one at my high school, but they don’t. Then again, if a lot of the principle filming was done in Arizona maybe the school felt they got shafted and decided not to honor Bill and Ted.
Defeated, my tour came to an abrupt close when I realized it’s Wednesday night and I had to get back home to drink my face off with my friends. I’ll be sure to regale them with stories about how everyone in San Dimas is just like they were depicted in the ’80s. No one has changed at all. I’ll also talk about the weird western motif you see when you drive into town along Arrow Highway. What’s with the wagons and old country-style font on the street signs, anyway? I guess I’ll never know, because it wasn’t mentioned in Excellent Adventure or Bogus Journey. What’s more, even if they did offer an explanation for why the town looks the way it looks in the movie, odds are they’d be describing a town in fucking Arizona.
Talk about a bogus journey. My San Dimas tour might have killed an entire afternoon, but it also killed my buzz. And that’s what I get for having an awesome idea — dashed hopes and murdered dreams. Thanks, San Dimas!
White Hills – Dead
Aidan Baker – Liminoid (Part 1)
