Friday, August 6, 2010

OTBR: The Classic Red Barn In Iowa

Latitude: 40.403300° N
Longitude: 94.832800° W

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 the course of the Santa Clara River, just a few dozen meters from where it meets the Pacific Ocean
  • in the Potomac River on the trail along The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park
  • at the dead end of gravel road on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota, from which two driveways run to home sites
  • ten meters from the road in the forest of Saaremaa, the largest island of Estonia
  • high above a forest road in Colorado, with views of Antero Reservoir and Buffalo Peaks
  • in a small, dry creek bed called Sheep Gulch in the Sacramento Valley of California
  • near an open field and a playground in Missouri's Babler State Park
  • in a forest at a steep embankment, the back of a quarry in South Carolina
  • near a large ramshackle house falling to pieces in a grove of trees beyond a soybean field in North Carolina
  • in front of the garage door of a contemporary rendered brick fawn coloured house, all neat and tidy, in Moonee Ponds, Australia
  • inside of a brick house with a brown roof and a single second floor room whose exterior was done in the gingerbread style in Shawnee Hills, Ohio
  • along a rough, narrow track among olive trees and grape vines in the low hills just north of Lucca, Italy
  • in Ohio, on a property line with a house to the west and field of soybeans to the east
  • unreachable in the middle of a corn field in Illinois ("With the great growing season, the adage of 'Knee-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July' has been surpassed by sweet corn that is already at tassel.")
  • in Utah, in the middle of a field of middling-tall corn being irrigated with a center-pivot sprinkler system
  • in a corn field in Missouri, surrounded by the rumbling of thunder and the whine of wind turbines
  • in Pennsylvania, beyond a large statue of a pig in a corn field planted in 16 bands of rows of different heights
  • in Utah's Ashley National Forest, surrounded by junipers and pinion pines
  • in New Jersey, through 30 yards of dense woods and in a clearing with a solar collector panel in the center
  • outside Phoenix, on what looks to be a fairway, only the rest of the course is missing
  • on railroad tracks in Finland, where the summer temps reached an all-time high of 37,2 degrees Centigrade
  • and on the California/Arizona border, where the temps reached 50 degrees C., in a hot and dry gravel quarry

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