Road Tripping To Deadville

Now that we're back from vacation it's time to blow up my blog with pictures from the coolest part of our vacation: Our Walking Dead Road Trip.  (See, it has capitals?  It's officially THAT cool.)  I know a couple people in my circle would like to make this trip too, so this might be a little heavy on the details, but hey....when you've got this kind of information to share, might as well right?? :)

Alright, so a Walking Dead Road Trip?  What's that??  We knew this show was filmed not too far from our house and since we are fans anyways, it seemed like a cool addition.  Thankfully the internet provided us a massive list of GPS points so all we had to do was plug them into the phone and listen to directions.  Jamie had made a huge list that took us in order of locations so we wouldn't be traipsing back and forth across the state.  It flowed really well this way, even though things were out of order.  I am going to post in the order we saw them in, not in the order these scenes appeared in the actual show.

Our first stop was a little weird.  We're driving and we think "Surely we are lost..." but the navigation was telling us we were on the right track.  We turned off a main road and towards this subdivision when it yelled at us "Your destination is on the right..." So we turned and there it was.  The daycare.  It was then we realized it was going to be a cool day.  This daycare, listed for sale, was just right there, off the road, but totally looked abandoned and decrepit.  I was in awe thinking how did they find this place??

The next stop was also confusing because the GPS was wrong.  Totally wrong (well the coordinates we had) but as I scanned the scene, I told my husband "Over there...that looks REALLY familiar.." We drove to this parking lot and this was the view:

 Do you recognize this??  I did.  We couldn't figure out how to get down there, so my husband walked through the parking lot I took this picture from and down a hill.  He found a bunch of guys talking so we loaded back up and drove to what appeared to be the entrance.  The man we found was super nice and confirmed 'Yep, this is the Woodbury Zombie arena."  He gladly walked us through this ginormous warehouse where they manufacture industrial water tanks and on the other side was one of the coolest filming locations we visited.  He explained they were working one night, with these big floodlights on and this dude just came up and asked them if they could film there.  They did their thing from 11 pm to 7 am.  The stairs in the picture of the ones Michonne walked down when she busted back into Woodbury and those cage looking things held the arena "biters."  How cool is that?!?!

After this crazy cool photo op, we headed to the next location, where we did a drive-by:

The high school where Shane sacrificed Otis.  School was in session, so we didn't stop to take a bunch of pictures.

Then....a really creepy out of the way place....

Wow, totally abandoned and again, we were kind of in awe about the work that went into scouting these crazy locations.  This was just an abandoned hotel in the midst of suburbia.  It looks so zombish, but it was on a main road!!

Next stop, let's see Morgan.  Or not ;)

The sign that said something like "Keep Out, I Mean It.." Was hanging up when you peeked into the windows.  Crazy.  This is where we rang into another few people doing the same thing we were doing!  They were from Alabama and informed us that "Woodbury" had had an Andrew Lincoln siting that morning, in the town's coffee shop!

Less than exciting, but a cool thing to see was the waterfall thing where they all went after the farm was raided by zombies....There was a sign on the entrance that said to call if you wanted in for pictures and it implied it would cost a pretty penny.  We just snapped one from the side of the road:

Then we found the church.  I made the kids pose on the front steps and I LOVE this picture!

After the church we decided to find Woodbury.  We were so excited when we rolled though town.  We ended up going to a park in town to eat lunch and let the kids blow off steam.  After filling our bellies, we drove back, parked and looked around.  It was quite nice for a post-apocalypse town!

Everywhere we went people were so accommodating and very eager to share their "Walking Dead" stories.  I got coffee in the coffee shop that Andrew Licoln had purchased his the same day and of course, that was a bit of fan girl giddiness for me.  

We went to one more place that wasn't nearly as exciting....the actual studio.  On the road there were cops and a whole road blocked off for "extras parking..." so they were filming somewhere on site that day:

If you're reading this shortly after I post it, it won't have the GPS coordinates up yet (have to get them off a flash drive AND my son is still working on the video he took during...I'll post an update when those are included!)