How to stumble on a secret Bachelorette filming spot and 4 things I’ve learned from this week’s madness

The strange, exciting Bachelor Nation world has invaded the Lowcountry this week and I found myself in the middle of the madness Tuesday night.

I say this, still pretty exhausted after I spent six hours standing, waiting, and wondering around a four-block perimeter of downtown Bluffton where crews were filming episode 4 of The Bachelorette. I can only imagine how exhausted the actual workers on the show are, who were literally hustling as I was standing there trying to put the reality TV puzzle together.

I told myself I was going for work as a reporter, but really I went because I get major FOMO when anything remotely newsworthy is going on near me and I’m an obnoxiously curious person who has admittedly watched an unknown amount of Bachelor/Bachelorette shows that have left me with so many questions.

Full disclosure: I attended this as a regular person with no press pass (they didn’t give them to anyone besides ABC-affiliated journalists). I stayed outside of the actual filming perimeters producers set up surrounding the concert area with people who signed releases to be extras.

Here are five things I learned about “The Bachelorette” madness from this week:

My co-worker Liz Farrell had no idea what to expect Tuesday night. Extras were told to arrive on scene between 7 and 9 p.m. According to the press release, country newcomer Russell Dickerson was scheduled to take the stage around 10:15 p.m. and we heard Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay and her date were scheduled to make an appearance soon after that.

What really happened: The concert didn’t start until around 11:30 p.m. After a whole lot of anticipation, Rachel and her date Dean strolled in sometime after midnight and danced adorably to a love song in front of the downtown Bluffton crowd for less than 10 minutes.

“One thing you’ll learn about television is we’re always late,” producer Megan Kropf told the crowd a few hours before the crowd saw any real Bachelorette action.

So basically, a lot of these fans waited about five hours to see the shining ABC reality star for less than 10 minutes.

Liz and I had an idea when we realized we had several hours to kill before we were going to see any action near the concert area: Check out the surrounding neighborhoods for big trucks, buses, trailers and Hollywood-looking people (that should definitely stick out in Old Town Bluffton — a very Mayberry-ish town).

Surprisingly, we struck gold just a block away from the concert.

We turned the corner on Boundary Street and saw a beaming Bluffton home within eyeshot. We saw lights, cameras and lots of action. Gold.

The yard was literally buzzing and glowing. The street was cluttered with trucks and trailers. And it was all wide open to the public.

We checked out the scene and found out “The Bachelorette” crew was renting the home to film the pre-concert dinner with Rachel and her date Dean before they headed to the concert.

Later that night, we got the genius idea to ditch the concert and check out the secret spot. Well, it really wasn’t secret, because it was lit up like an NFL stadium and still completely open to the public. We drove by twice. The first time, we saw Rachel and Dean in the middle of a romantic dinner in the yard. The second time, much to my surprise, we actually caught them walking from the yard to the street, hand and hand, probably five feet from Liz’s car. It was madness. Rachel definitely saw me with my phone out the window and said something like “Oh that’s great.” Yes Rachel, it was.

You would think that a contest-style reality show would like to have a handle on what spectators are documenting and sharing with the world far before the show airs, but I think the producers realize this is 2017 and it’s pretty much impossible to control anything from the internet gods, especially when you’re dealing with a crowd of hundreds of people.

Early on in the night, a producer told everyone that Rachel, who is African-American, was on a date with Dean (the guy who is not African-American and known for saying “I just want to let you know I’m ready to go black and I’m never going to go back” in the season finale of “The Bachelor” when Rachel met her potential lovers) and that they were filming episode 4 of the show and there were 15 guys still in the running.

The only thing they were serious about were those wristbands, which indicated that participants had signed a release to show their faces on television.

Note: I’m told this was a different case on Wednesday when they asked participants to put their phones away — but obviously people still did it, because millennials are good at these things. Example:

Well, we know “The Bachelorette” isn’t anything close to reality, but it’s pretty unbelievable when you stop and think about how many people dedicate hours of their time for just a few minutes of one episode. This means dozens of police officers, hundreds of extras, a whole crew, a bunch of producers, and lots and lots of families in homes around Old Town who definitely didn’t get to sleep before 1 a.m. on a Tuesday. All for five minutes of television.

Usually when big Hollywood types come to towns like Bluffton, they fail to recognize that places like Bluffton get really sick of being lumped in with the more well-known adjacent place, places like Hilton Head Island. But every time a producer spoke to the crowd they recognized Bluffton.

“Bluffton is getting too big you say?” Megan Kropf said to a crowd member. “California is too big. But you people are way nicer here. I ought to move here. Look how great Bluffton looks right now!”

“Bachelorette” host Chris Harrison took the stage Tuesday night and also mentioned Bluffton and loving “the seafood, the golf, and all the cold beer here.”

Will they mention Bluffton in the actual show?

We’ll know when the episode airs in June.

This story was originally published March 30, 2017 at 3:53 PM with the headline "How to stumble on a secret Bachelorette filming spot and 4 things I’ve learned from this week’s madness."