OTBR: An Olympic Rowing Course in Australia

Latitude: S 33° 43.560
Longitude: E 150° 40.812
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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• in New South Wales, at the 1000 metre mark on the rowing course of the International Regatta Complex, which had been established at Penrith Lakes for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games
  
• in Göss, a district of the city Leoben in Styria (Austria) not far from the Gösser Brewery, where the world famous Gösser beer is brewed
  
• in Maryland, atop a crest overlooking the construction site of a planned community, "Brickyard Station"
  
• behind an apartment complex in southern California, near a depression that looks like a flood-control basin, which contains a set of horse corrals with at least five horses
  
• southeast of Melbourne, in the Highlands horse stables, a beautiful lush, green property with a driveway that extends more than a kilometre
  
• in a horse paddock west of Melbourne, in a semi-rural area that suburbia is beginning to encroach
  
• in the parking lot of a Home Depot outside Chicago, a rural area giving way to suburbia ("The stretch of road nearby the point has over 68 restaurants in a 3 mile stretch.")
  
• in the parking lot of a shopping center in southern California, 300 meters from a Panera Bread restaurant ("an enjoyable, nay, pleasurable waypoint")
  
• amidst a glorious display of red, pink and white rhododendrons surrounded by tree ferns in thick brush west of Melbourne
  
• down Rabbit Road in Illinois farm country, in a checkerboard of fields, some plowed with exposed soil and some with light-colored corn stalks cut only a foot from the ground but not yet plowed under
  
• in Springfield, Illinois, behind a two-story contemporary house with an old fashioned TV antenna on the roof
  
• on the right bank of the Mississippi River north of St. Louis, in an abandoned and overgrown area that once was the scene of industrial activity
  
• on Arizona State Trust land below a long bridge over the dry river basin
  
• in Estonia, in forest near the Karujärve (Bear Lake) camping site, closed down for winter and nearer to an abandoned Soviet military missile base (Dejevo), where a ski resort is now
  
• in Elmwood, Nebraska, home to Bess Streeter Aldrich ("I can't remember much about her except that she was a writer.")
  
• and in Germany, in the fields of Lichtenhorst ("there lives a stork at the rim of the fields there, alone cause the rest of his swarm is already gone to Africa. Strange!")