OTBR: A Rainbow in Utah

Latitude: N 39° 20.946
Longitude: W 111° 55.656
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 typical Utah country with sagebrush, pinion pine and juniper trees ("a beautiful rainbow appeared so we drove into the park for an unobstructed photograph")
  
• in Wyoming, in unfenced open range land with a dusting of light snow, the outskirts of Cheyenne visible in the distance and a large windfarm on a mesa just a few miles south
  
• in New Mexico, about 150 ft from an empty snuff can in fairly flat desert with a few widely spaced 6 ft mesquite bushes the largest living thing around
  
• in Cupertino, California, just north of St. Andrew Armenian Church, a beautiful, terracotta-colored house of worship with a khachkar in front commemorating "the 1700th anniversary of the proclamation of Christianity in Armenia"
  
• in Arizona, in the gravel parking lot (with painted stripes) of the Oro Valley Church of the Nazarene
  
• in a small street in a suburb of Melbourne, near a park where there is a geocache hidden and a school where some children were playing basketball
  
• in a cul-de-sac in Virgina with three driveways, one with a basketball goal, one with a mailbox with two cardinals and the third a mailbox with four white horses
  
• behind a house in Maryland with a mailbox with very pretty wildflowers and a couple of butterflies painted on it
  
• in Nebraska, in a harvested corn field near a rundown farm complex with a large "Go Big Red" sign on the barn
  
• in Minnesota in a harvested corn field with two eagles eating something
  
• on Australia's Mornington peninsula, on a small hobby farm with some black cattle and three alpacas quietly grazing on lush grass
  
• in the Orange Grove RV Park outside Bakersfield, California with a purple banner with white letters reading "Vagabond RV Group" flapping jauntily in the wind
  
• and in a table grape vineyard north of Bakersfield, California ("Off in the distance, every ten-fifteen seconds, I could hear a loud 'boom' noise. I suspect that these were 'bird bombs': small explosives used to scare birds out of the fields.")