Longitude: 24.46510° E
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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 a meadow in Minnesota, beyond a windbreak of trees
- in California's Antelope Valley, just north of Apollo Park, a nice area of grass and trees that is something of an oasis amid the sagebrush and mesquite
- 1.4 km into the forest near Scheibenhardt, France
- in a roundabout near the coast in Tuscany across from an olive grove
- in northern Victoria, Australia, on a rocky rise in a light eucalyptus forest, with an old burnt tree marking the spot
- in the rolling green hills of Tuscany, alongside an unmade track leading to a factory at the back of the small rural town of Buonconvento
- in unimproved sandy, sage-brush covered land near oil wells and oil storage tanks at the foot of McCracken Point in Utah
- at a barn in Germany, with farm machines inside, a fire place and sofa in front, and evidence of a party not long ago
- beyond the fence on land owned by the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. and once used to convert coal into gas and is now considered a toxic waste site
- on the grounds of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, northwest of an aircraft hanger which held NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO) until its retirement in 1995
- behind a wall surrounding small houses in a not-very-scenic mixed residential/commercial/industry suburb of Beijing
- in the Netherlands, near a house on a canal in the Zuidplaspolder, 6.75m below sea level, past many large greenhouses growing thousands of small maple trees
- in the parking lot of a small overlook area for Illinois' Baker's Lake Nature Preserve, on the northern edge of the lake
- in Nebraska, near a fake private lake with some relatively large new houses pretending they are on a beach
- in a farm field in Germany, where the ground was still very much moist and soft
- in a forest in Estonia, along a nasty and muddy road ("I got almost stuck several times and didn't recognize my car after that.")
- near Barstow, California, along a passable dirt road with a lot of "whoop-de-doos" and crossings of small dry stream channels
- in Brazil, down a variety of dirt roads that, thanks for recent rains and morning sun, were neither dusty nor muddy, in a field with assorted cows and sheep
- in the UK, just off a footpath which you reach through a gate in the wall surrounding a field which had sheep and lambs in it
- and out of reach in Utah, just a few switchbacks and a few hundred feet in elevation up the road where snow drifts prevented progress
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