Longitude: W 111° 41.442
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".
- among the red and yellow autumn leaves above two switchbacks on Utah's Mount Nebo
- on Estonia's Muhu Island, in a sheep pasture only 100 meters from the Baltic Sea
- in a pine forest, ten years or so from harvesting, on New Zealand's North Island
- on Discovery Point in Seattle, off a typical Washington narrow road with dense heavy undergrowth, tall trees with big canopies
- in vineyards in Wackenheim, Germany
- a drive-by on central California's Interstate Highway 5, with grape vines on one side and nut trees on the other
- in a cotton field in California's Central Valley, where a nearby orchard owner posted this sign: "Prayer is the best way to meet the Lord. Trespassing is faster."
- in Iowa, in a cornfield across a gravel road from five storage bins which must be loaded with grain as the drying fans can be heard whirring
- in a farm field in central Illinois, now shared with hundreds of wind turbines generating power
- just inside the fence of an unharvested soybean field in rolling western Iowa hills
- in a cornfield in Nebraska down a dirt track with gravel in the tire tracks and grass between ("Our tires were caked with mud, so that when we got back on the main county road, we were throwing clods from all four tires.")
- in Illinois, in a harvested cornfield in the broad area between the Mississippi River and tall bluffs
- out of reach on a peninsula formed by a looping river in New South Wales, a peninsula whose neck had been washed away, leaving the point on an island
- on an abandoned dairy farm in Chino, California ("Lots of stalls, feed racks and water troughs to be seen, and a couple of empty houses with some broken windows stand guard over all of it.")
- across the street from a Safeway grocery store in Arnold, Maryland
- in the lounge room of a large, modern two-storey grey house in a very nice neighbourhood just a block away from the beach and the popular Main Street shopping strip of Mornington, Victoria, Australia
- next to a barn at the dead end of a road in a housing development in Maryland, near a tree that isn't there (that is, the tree shown in Google Street View is no longer there)
- beside a pond, very near to the Illinois state fairgrounds in Springfield
- and in bare rolling hills, but out of reach, on Utah's Fort Williams State Military Reservation
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