Thursday, June 5, 2014

OTBR: A Field of Rapeseed in Ukraine

Latitude: N 49° 19.176
Longitude: E 027° 13.524

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 Ukraine, on the overgrown left bank of the Vovk river near of the Bohdanivtsi village, near numerous yellow fields of rapeseeds
  • in a paddock near a mob of sheep along Moorabool West Road in Victoria, Australia
  • on the edge of the woods in Gusen Valley, near Reichenau, Austria
  • along a dirt road on an uncultivated hillside above Sevier Valley, Utah
  • just out of scoring range beyond fences on private land in New Zealand ("Oh well....got to have a very pleasant ride on my motorcycle in what was glorious weather for late autumn.")
  • on the Hume Freeway north of Melbourne, Australia
  • in the Tallarook district of Victoria, on a wide verge planted with gum trees with paddocks of sheep and cattle on both sides ("Things are crook in Tallarook ...")
  • near a restored police call box just off P Street NW in Washington, DC, at the west end of the bridge over Rock Creek Parkway, near
  • north of Denver, near the York Street bridge over the South Platte River trail
  • across the road from a dairy farm west of Melbourne, in a hilly and very green area with well-grassed paddocks which had benefited from the recent heavy rains
  • in Oxnard, California, in front of El Rio Elementary School with lots of golden-yellow school buses
  • in a little hidden subdivision of million dollar homes outside Chicago
  • in typical bush in New South Wales's Coorabakh National Park
  • in Nebraska, in a muddy cornfield that doesn't appear to be planted yet ("classic featureless Nebraska farm country")
  • in Illinois, east of the Mississippi River from St Louis, in an upscale residential area with French-sounding street names and large (but not huge) houses on large lots
  • in very flat and open rangeland on the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills ("some eroded sanddunes were visible from the road; a beautiful large brown hawk was sitting on the fencepost")
  • next to a willow tree along the path of a small nature reserve "NSG Uedesheimer Rheinbogen" in a curve of Germany's river Rhine
  • in a walnut orchard north of Sacramento, California
  • in the nowhere grasslands of western North Dakota, mostly featureless rolling hills prairie
  • in high desert south of Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, near a few Sego Lilies, the state flower of Utah
  • in a fallow field in Arizona, just off I-10, within sight of "Cochise's Head," a feature in mountain range in the distance
  • outside Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, along Avenue Road, lined with hundreds of trees and memorial plaques for soldiers
  • in Virginia, just 112 meters off a dirt road, BUT, there is a grove of bamboo growing up to the edge of the road ("the 40 feet I had to go took a long time, squeezing my way between closely-spaced 20-foot-tall bamboo")
  • and in Emmitsburg, Maryland, at the shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born citizen of the United States to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church

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