Dexter Filming Locations: Hannah's Bus Trip

DEXTER Filming Locations - hundreds of actual places where the TV show Dexter was filmed.


The location: Hannah's Bus Trip



Q. What is it supposed to be on the show?

    A. A bus station, and public streets.

Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show?

    A. Somewhere in Miami, and on the road between Miami and Daytona Beach.

Q. When did we see it on the show?

    A. In the final Episode 12, of the final Season 8, "Remember the Monsters?".

    After failing to escape Miami at the Miami airport, and with a hurricane coming, Hannah is forced to switch to a bus.

    We first see Hannah, Dexter & Harrison standing in a line outside the bus station, as they wait to get aboard the bus to Tallahassee, Florida.

    Dexter tells Hannah that he can't leave Miami until Saxon is dead and Debra is safe. He tells her to go alone, and take Harrison with her, promising to meet up with her later.

    He says goodbye to her and Harrison, and tells her to phone him once she reaches another airport.

    Later, we see Hannah on the bus driving from Miami to Daytona Beach, talking to Harrison.

    Suddenly, Elway appears, grabs her arm, and tells her he is going to turn her in for the reward money, as soon as they reach Daytona.

    Hannah offers Elway a drink, but given her reputation for poisoning people, he naturally doesn't accept.

    But then Hannah produces a hypodermic needle (filled with the same M99 that Dexter uses to render his victims unconscious) and plunges it into Elway's leg.

    She tells him he will wake up in Daytona in a few hours, feeling embarrassed.

Q. What is it actually in real life?

    A. An odd mix of an airport terminal, public streets, and stock video from various other states.







Q. Where can I find it in real life?

    A. These bus scenes are a bit of a hot mess, a combination of several local locations, mixed in with stock establishing shots from far away...


    Take, for instance, the establishing shot of the Miami bus terminal, which begins the scene, at 24:01:


    Not only is that building not in Florida, it's not even in California!

    It appears to be a stock video clip, and I finally tracked it down to Nevada.  Turns out it's the Bonneville Transit Center, at
    101 E. Bonneville Ave, in Las Vegas.  The shot seen is taken from near 600 Casino Center Blvd.  Here is a matching Google StreetView of the building. And here is a map link.



Then they cut to the actual bus station, where they filmed the scene with Hannah,
Dexter & Harrison saying goodbye, as Hannah gets on the bus, at 24:09:



    It probably goes without saying that it's not in Miami.  But it's also not even a bus station.

    They shot that scene just outside of the old Terminal 1 at the Ontario International Airport, at 1940 Moore Way (near the cell phone waiting lot).  That's the same airport that they used earlier for the Miami Airport scenes - but for this scene they used a different terminal.  In the photo above, they are walking southeast, out of the terminal.

    Here is a matching Bing StreetSide View.
      And here is a map link.




Once Hannah is on the bus, at 36:13, we see an establishing shot of several buses
driving in traffic, supposedly between Miami and Daytona Beach.

    Now, you'd think that shot would be from either Florida or California, right?  Wrong.  It's not even in the country.

    Amazingly, I tracked down that view to Alberta, Canada!

    To  be more exact, the blue & yellow building seen on the left side (with the words "...land Lumber" visible on front) turned out to be Spruceland Lumber, at Highway 63 North & Confederation Way, in Fort McMurrray, Alberta.  (You can see the same building on their website.
    )  Here is a map link.



    Then we get to the scenes inside the bus, as they drive between Miami & Daytona, at 36:20:

     

The buildings we see passing by outside the bus windows, as the bus drives along (and Hannah M99s Elway), are actually parts of the Hilton DoubleTree Hotel, at 222 N. Vineyard Ave, in Ontario, CA -- just north of the airport/bus station.

But you're not seeing the Vineland side of that hotel.  Instead, they are driving along the north side of the hotel. They are  heading east on the 1900 block of E. Convention Way.  (After they pass the hotel, we also get a very brief glimpse of the Ontario Convention Center.)  Here is a
Google StreetView.
  And here is a map link.

Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

    A.  The bus station itself was easy enough.  Rick tipped me to that one, and I was able to easily confirm it by using Bing StreetSide to match it up.


    But the rest of the locations took a lot of work.

    • The establishing shot in Vegas was tricky.
    • All I knew was that a street sign in the shot read "...er Blvd - 600".  Not much help. Plus, a column near the bus read "Transit Center".  I thought it was probably a real bus station, so I started checking Google images of various transit centers to try to find a match.  I started with those in Miami, and didn't find it there.  Then I switched to Southern California and looked at those in L.A. and San Diego.  That didn't work either.

      Finally, I noticed that an ad on the bus passing by read "99.3 FM".  So I searched to see where that radio station might be found.  Alas, it turned out there are
      99.3 FM's in dozens of different cities.

      After checking bus stations in many of those cities, and coming up blank, I realized there was another clue: the palm trees out front. Palms are usually limited to warm states, so I narrowed my search to those.

      When I found a 99.3 FM in Las Vegas, I searched for images of a "transit center" in Vegas, and sure enough, it pulled up this matching photo of the Bonneville Transit Center.

    • How did I figure the highway in Canada?

    • There were only two clues.  First, on the left side of the view was a yellow & blue building with a sign reading "Lumber".  However, there are a zillion lumber stores in the world, and I quickly gave up on looking at all of them in the Miami and L.A. areas.

      But then I looked closely at the buses on the road, and several of them had signs reading
      "Diversified".

      So I Googled for "Diversified Bus" and found a bus schedule that mentioned the town of Wood Buffalo.  That turned out to be in Alberta, Canada.

      So I began searching Alberta, looking at their lumber stores, hoping to find one that was blue & yellow, with a name ending in "...land".

      That search returned a fair share of stores, but only one ended in "land" - Spruceland Lumber.  So I went to take a look at it.  Alas, there is no Google StreetView up in that part of the world, but an aerial photo showed that familiar blue roof.  I then went to Spruceland's website, and found a full matching photo of the building.  And the curving highway out front also matched the scene.


    • By comparison, tracking down the scenery seen through the bus windows was relatively simple.

    • When I watched the scene, and freeze-framed it, I saw the name "DoubleTree" appear on one of the buildings.

      I immediately recognized that as a Hilton hotel brand,and my first guess was that it was probably the DoubleTree Hotel at the Cabrillo marina (where they had filmed scenes this season).  It looks a lot like it, but it didn't quite match.

      I checked a few other DoubleTrees in the L.A./Long Beach area, before it occurred to me that they had left their usual turf in this episode to go out to Ontario.

      So I checked to see if Ontario had a DoubleTree Hotel, and sure enough, there it was, right next to the airport.  Then, it was just a matter of using Google StreetView to match the shots of the buildings seen through the bus window - that told me that they were heading east on Convention Center Way.

      Whew!

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