'The Office' Finale: Fans, Stars Flock To The Real Scranton

Excitement for "The Office"'s series finale May 16 took fans and some of the show's cast to an otherwise unassuming and remote end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike on Saturday. Rainn Wilson (Dwight), Jenna Fischer (Pam) and John Krasinski (Jim) appeared to meet with hundreds of fans assembled outside the Lackawanna County Courthouse in the real city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where "The Office" fictitiously took place.

"The Office" was mainly filmed in California, but used much of Scranton's and the surrounding Pocono Mountains' attractions notable parts of the show. Michael Scott memorably took his coworkers on "The Booze Cruise" on Lake Wallenpaupack, a boating and camping destination just a few miles down I-84 from Scranton. Spoken references in the show to the Pocono cities of Stroudsburg, Old Forge, Dickson City and Carbondale pay homage to the real-life residents of the area.

Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company is closing its doors to the television world later this month, and the stars of the show thought of no better way to end it than to show their appreciation for the working-class Poconos city that was their on-screen home for those many years. "To have this many people come out of their way, driving from different places...to say thank you is totally bizarre," Krasinski said of the massive crowd filing in Route 11 and converging on the heart of Scranton, "We [n]ever realized how many people we had touched."

Indeed, people from elsewhere than the city of 76,000, likely made their way to Scranton for the event, coming from more populated areas near New York City, three hours to the east and Philadelphia, two hours south. The AP reported that a woman drove from as far as Kentucky to see "The Office" cast in Scranton, the same day her state was hosting the classic horse race, the Kentucky Derby. "I find the ["Office"'s] awkward situations hilarious," Briquelle Hoppes of Louisville said. No character was likely more awkward than Dunder-Mifflin's leader, Michael Scott.

On one notable episode, Scott, played by Steve Carell, made a touristy faux pais when he believed that the elevator ride down a mine shaft at local attraction was supposed to be a thrill ride. The show often nodded to the rich coal mining history of the Schuylkill Valley and western Poconos.

Carell was notably absent from the downtown Scranton event, but appeared somewhat unannounced later a few miles outside the city at PNC Field in Moosic, Pa. to the surprise of fans at a Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees minor league baseball game. The stadium is ironically just up Montage Mountain Road from a favorite stop of Michael Scott's, the formerly-named Montage Mountain Performing Arts Center, now known as the Toyota Pavilion.