Thursday, March 7, 2013

OTBR: A Date Palm in Melbourne

Latitude: S 37° 45.180
Longitude: E 144° 56.538
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 suburban Melbourne, under the shade of a large date palm in the concrete driveway of a white weatherboard house protected by a cyclone wire fence
  • up Wildcat Parkway south of Denver ("Some nice statues of Wildcats nearby and a good view of the mountains.")
  • in Payson, Utah, in the back garden of a two-story, older house with a covered porch and an attached carport
  • in a nice, two-story bungalow in Glendale, California, in a residential neighborhood very old for SoCal, with some houses over 100 years old
  • in a paddock south of Bendigo, Australia, with no animals but plenty of birdlife -- mainly galahs and currawongs
  • in a plowed field in the Texas panhandle, with nothing more than ranches and an occasional small town along the farm-to-market roads
  • 144 meters into a plowed field in Illinois farm country east of the Mississippi River near St. Louis
  • in an unfenced, harvested soybean field in Nebraska, with snow too deep to walk and trees in the distance covered with hoar frost
  • in a low spot between two hills in a "wild and rugged" part of Wisconsin
  • down a dirt road into the woods in rural Virginia ("no gate and no Do Not Enter sign")
  • on one of the holes of the Freshmeadow golf course 20 miles west of Chicago
  • in an industrial park in Phoenix surrounded by large buildings serving as distribution centers for various businesses
  • and in the parking lot of an Olive Garden restaurant in Laurel, Maryland, a popular spot for Geodashing players this month ;-)

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