OTBR: Rabbit Tracks in Finland

Latitude: 66.5376° N
Longitude: 25.7216° E


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".

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• just off the road in Finland, otherwise it would have required following rabbit tracks left on deep snow into a forest
  
• near a barn on a farmstead in Minnesota, reached via snow covered farm trails
  
• in the Montrose neighborhood of Glendale, California on a narrow path that runs up a little ridge line ("Not a lot to see other than scrub oak, laurel sumac and buckwheat. We saw two rather large mountain lion paw prints in the wet sand")
  
• near a road in a nice forest in Estonia, with remnants of winter's snow here and there, some fallen trees, an animal trail, stones covered with thick green moss and a low old stone-fence
  
• in a harvested, unfenced soybean field in flat country in Nebraska ("saw a few newborn calves, this might be their first day outside")
  
• in the middle of La Riviere Marsh in the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge surrounded by brown vegetation and tiny ponds
  
• just off the road at the base of a hill in equestrian land around Wandin North, Victoria, Australia
  
• on the side of a steeply sloped north facing hill just south of the abandoned Mile-Wide Mine in Arizona's Saguaro National Park
  
• behind the locked gate of a quarry near Langwarren, Victoria, Australia
  
• in an apartment complex of fast growing Orland Park township, Illinois, ("it looked like nothing but horrible sprawl") near the Cook County Forest Preserve which offers some of the best hiking in the Chicago area
  
• and on the back side of Arizona's Tucson Mountains in in an empty field between the Avra Valley Hardware and the Water Hole Package Liquor store