OTBR: Morning Mood near Joehlingen, Germany

Latitude: N 49° 02.724
Longitude: E 008° 33.942

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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• by a beautiful tree and stacks of wood on a small country road near the village of Jöhlingen, Germany
  
• near Stoke-on-Trent by an unusual half-timbered church
  
• at the restaurant "Grüner Baum" near Ottersweier, Germany, where a "tree face" greets visitors
  
• on Australia's Mornington Peninsula, on private land that has been cleared and replanted with native trees
  
• under the spreading branches of a HUGE Morton Bay fig tree in New South Wales
  
• in a wholesale plant nursery about 70 kilometres east of Melbourne
  
• in Nevada, just off US 93, where there is snow on the mountains on either side of the valley but lots of dry stream beds running downhill
  
• in the dry, parched plains around Diggers Rest, Victoria, Australia, by a boarding kennel and a cattery named DogDayz and KoolCats
  
• right in the middle of Sicklebrook Lane off Eckington Road near Dronfield (as an American, I never tire of hearing English place names)
  
• in Illinois, in some grass and mushy snow at the top edge of the ditch of the frontage road of IH 55, with typical Illinois farmland, currently dormant and fairly wet, on either side
  
• in New South Wales, beyond a gate with a typical "Ozzie" chain and latch ("as I opened the gate I scared a 'mob' of wallabies away. Very cute.")
  
• on a road through open desert north of Tucson, not too far from the Dove Mountain Golf Course that had just hosted the Accenture Match Play Golf Tournament
  
• and in Nevada, just off US 95, near nothing but stony ground, sand in the washes, and scattered small bushes