Longitude: 71.960999° W
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A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.
After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".
- in Maryland, in a dumpster behind a black iron fence near a Starbucks
- in an intersection in New York, north of the Friendly's Restaurant and south of the Tim Hortons Coffee Shop
- in farmer's field, 50 meters north of the SPCA shelter ("One of those rare waypoints in the interior of British Columbia that you can drive to within 125 meters and then walk unobstructed to ground zero.")
- in an Illinois farm field full of corn stubble ("It was refreshing to see the sunshine and mud versus clouds and snowdrifts.")
- in a California field filled with a low, scrubby, but very green plant ("which I presume is some sort of crop, but it's no plant that this city boy recognizes")
- next door to the Hurley Vineyard near Westernport Bay on Australia's Mornington Peninsula
- in a meadow in Germany in front of a forest with some smaller trees fallen in the last storm
- near a wrought-iron gate with the name Edgecliff in large, ornate letters in upscale, rural Sisters, Oregon, where ranchettes dot the landscape and it is not unusual to see horses and llamas
- next to a house in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a rusted metal saguaro sculpture in the front yard
- in England over a wooden stile over a wall to a footpath in a field, in the gloom, with sheep off in the distance
- by the side of the road near Searchlight, Nevada ("It was too dark to take any photos and they wouldn't have shown much anyway since it is pretty much all desert out there.")
- in the front yard of a small concrete block house in Kirkland, Washington, where the trees are just starting to bloom
- in South Carolina, near the tracks used by Amtrak's AutoTrain, visited at night when the only thing visible was a tower with three solid red lights in a triangular pattern about midway up and a flashing orange light at the top
- in St. Louis' Tower Grove Park, near a shelter where a blow-up castle was set up and the sounds of children's laughter could be heard
- in high desert country of widely scattered pinion and juniper trees, sagebrush and grass on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northern Arizona
- at the bottom of a bluff in Wisconsin's Dunnsville Bottoms Public Hunting Grounds, which is mostly high grasses with scattered brush
- in Missouri, in the large steep rock embankment that forms the top part of a dam, a 1930s era flood protection/water reservoir project by the Army Corps of Engineers
- in woods and a lot of rough ground behind the Technical and Learning Center for the School District of Washington in Missouri
- on the Lewis Bridge over the Missouri River, not far from where it flows into the Mississippi River
- next to a flowering chamise bush on a brushy slope that is quite lush right now on the southern side of Conejo Peak, a small mountain on the western edge of the Santa Monica Mountains
- near a really long covered bridge in New England
- and deep enough into Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest that the view was the same in all directions, just trees
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