OK, I've accepted the fact that it takes hours for characters in the OC to drive from Newport Beach to Laguna Beach, when they are only 10 minutes apart. I've suspended disbelief over the piers in Newport Beach bearing no relation to reality. I've learned that one can apparently walk from Pelican Hills where the Cohan's seem to live down to Balboa in an impossible half-hour. But on last week's episode, I had enough. Since when did a desert -- a flippin' desert -- emerge between Newport and Brea!

I know. Technically, all of Southern California is a desert. But not like they were showing -- with cacti and a two lane dusty road!

To recap the episode, Ryan and Sadie leave Johnny's house in Newport Beach to see her uncle in Brea. We cut to a shot of them driving on this dusty road, and Ryan says something like "maybe the 5 to the 57 would be faster."

Please. We don't know exactly where Johnny's house is in Newport Beach, but chances are that it's near the Newport Beach/Costa Mesa border. It's certainly not over Pelican Hill way. So how are they going to get to Brea? They're going to drive the asphalt covered major city streets a very short distance to the 55 -- the Newport Freeway.

Got that? The Newport Freeway. As in a big fat freeway that runs all the way down to Newport Beach (well, a mile short). No dusty desert road. And you'll take the 55 to the 5 and then to the 57, just as Ryan suggests -- freeways all the way. Here's a map of the route. So what's with this desert scene?

The answer, of course, is that they later go to Indio. So while filming in Indio (or some stand-in that's probably nothing like Indio -- I haven't been there for a long time), they just film some desert road and make it out like it's part of Newport Beach.

We're behind the times here in the UK, of course -- so I did some searching to see if others Stateside were as appalled as me. A couple of references came up, this being my favorite:

Road trip time! Congested highways give way to lonely desert terrain as Ryan and Sadie make their way to the distant land of Brea...hey, wait a minute! A quick look at MapQuest tells me that Newport and Brea are only twenty-five miles apart, for a half-hour drive through terrain that doesn't seem to resemble the open desert Ryan and Sadie are coasting through. Plus, it's all highway. A fairly large highway. Either Volchok gave them the wrong directions as a prank that it's taken them way to long to figure out, or they're headed for a Brea in, like, New Mexico. Ryan urges Sadie to try taking a major highway to get them to their destination, which Sadie scoffs at, since she doesn't seem to think that highways are faster than crappy roads through the backcountry.

Well said. Meanwhile, now that we have Commander In Chief showing, can someone explain why the Speaker Of The House speaks using British words? That's a post for another time.

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