Now it was off to find a location that inspired the airfield in my story.  Although no longer an working airfield itself, it still had some wonderful buildings, a few good hangars and one giant hangar that had been transformed into production studio (the largest independent production studio in california, where they shot things like Spiderman 2).  Used to be a huge airplane factory back in the day (1940s) but I wasn’t sure how much of that would be left.

I got onto the main freeway, had Angelina play more Reacher for me and my GPS said it would be about a 90 min drive.  Perfect.  That would give me tons of time to do a few other things.

But damn, I was on the 1-5, a 5 lane highway when it slowed to a crawl and then that crawl stopped altogether.

ACK!!!

I ended up spending 2 ½ hours moving 4 miles.  I kid you not.  Luckily I had Reacher or I would have gotten quite grumpy.  But hey, Reacher was trying to figure out what was going on, he was having sex with a hot FBI agent and the serial killer was planning all manner of horrible thing so it was all good.  Sure I lost a ton of time but it was kind of relaxing.

I finally passed the problem, a car-semi accident that had blocked 3 whole lanes and then I made good time.  I got off in an area called Downey (which didn’t look too sketchy) and found something I didn’t expect.

That was Margot’s way of thinking.  Things may not always go right but if you kept your eyes open, you could be surprised what you found.

I found the world’s oldest McDonalds!!!

I didn’t know it was the oldest until I got back but even looking at it, hey, it looks really, really old.

Cool.