First: If you are under thirty-five, you may want to skip this post.

Second: San Dimas High School Football rules!!!!!

Shortly after I moved to California ten years ago, I passed a highway sign for San Dimas, the setting for that iconic 1989 film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. San Dimas was real? It sounded (and, in the movie, looked) like such a generic California town, I honestly thought they had made it up.

This weekend, when my husband and I had to drive our daughter to San Dimas to see a friend’s performance, we took the opportunity for a little location scouting. First stop, San Dimas High School, home of the Saints football team. Boy, is SDHS a good looking school! (Keanu Reeves deserved nothing less.) Since it’s still summer, the grounds were deserted except for some maintenance men who looked at me like I was a loon. Or like, maybe strange things were afoot …

… at the Circle K!

According to a very reliable source (some guy who posted on Yahoo answers), The legendary Circle K stood at the corner of Walnut Avenue and Arrow Highway. We went there and found four corners occupied by office parks. So, so wrong. We found a different Circle K, but there is no way the parking lot was big enough for George Carlin and his time traveling phone booth.

It’s been years since I watched Bill and Ted (I’m still traumatized by the awful sequel), but I was surprised to find that the San Dimas in real life looked nothing like the San Dimas in the movie. It is far prettier, with lush trees, mountain views, and old-time Western architecture. It’s like Frontierland, only without the sweaty tourists and the vendors hawking overpriced water bottles.

When I came home, I did another Google search that took me beyond Yahoo answers and discovered that . . . oh no. While the movie was set in San Dimas, it was actually filmed in and around Phoenix. The Circle K was in Tempe. “San Dimas High” was, in fact, in Scottsdale . . . where I lived for two years.

None of that detracts from the movie’s power or central message: Be excellent to one another.