Monday, October 15, 2012

OTBR: A Victorian House in San Francisco

Latitude: N 37° 45.924
Longitude: W 122° 28.206
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".



  • smack-dab in the middle of the city Tony Bennett left his heart in -- San Francisco -- atop a Victorian home across from Golden Gate Park
  • in Poland, in the forest on the edge of an orchard
  • in Missouri, at a three story brick house with a three car garage, in front of a pond with a large fountain/sprinkler in the middle
  • in the UK, beside a cycle path, which used to be a railway line and now has trees growing along it, making it an enclosed avenue ("very scenic")
  • in open bush, just some lantana, beside the highway in New South Wales
  • in a private garden in Germany, surrounded by a fence and "liguster" and "thuja" bushes
  • down a gravel road leading back into the storage area of the Baltimore Municipal Golf Corporation
  • in a forest preserve on the edges of the Des Plaines river in a well-known part of Chicago-land
  • in Colorado, in a working gravel pit of some sort, with retail construction in front
  • in Boronia, a fairly leafy eastern suburb of Melbourne, in a brown brick double story house with neat pots containing citrus trees on the verandah
  • in Finland, right in front of the Pälkäne Town Central Library ("Pälkäne is famous from the Battle of Kostianvirta, which was fought in 1713 between the defending Swedish-Finnish troops and attacking Russians")
  • in the Minnesota woods, near a dilapidated barn with weathered sideboards
  • in front of a shearing shed on a farm in Victoria, Australia, with hills all around covered in granite boulders and fields full of prime merino sheep
  • in Australia's Golf Course Resort at Barwon Heads, overlooking one of the immaculate greens surrounded by very well-built houses all with golf course views
  • at an undescribed location :-( in Hattiesburg, Mississippi ("a good city, it just has no personality and is flat out boring unless your only hobby is bar-hopping.")
  • in the sandy employee parking lot of a wind farm in southern California
  • in central California, over a slight rise, over coarse sandy ground, with a fair number of Joshua trees around
  • in the UK, in wet and muddy ground just off a footpath of the National Trust's Lyme Park, where there's a house and a deer park
  • in the exurbs of Council Bluffs, Iowa, near a farm with many chickens ("Eggs4Sale")
  • on California's China Lake Naval Weapons Center ("This is a pretty boring find, because I can't go into too much detail about the range.")

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