OTBR: Tidal Waters in New South Wales

Latitude: S 32° 11.538
Longitude: E 152° 27.480

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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• at the end of an hour-long kayak paddle in the tidal waters of Wallis Lake in New South Wales
• in Virginia, at the end of a road through the woods, with old homes set on large lots including one last house and old barn with a bunch of old trucks and cars
• outside Melbourne, in a neighborhood of single storey brick veneer properties on small suburban blocks, including one which had a very impressive dry weather garden bursting with cacti
• near Aurora, Utah, in a fenced field for cattle grazing and between a natural gas facility and the Western Clay Company's facility for bagging various types of dirt
• east of Las Vegas in the Sunrise Mountains, somewhere in the middle of the Permian and Triassic layers of Rainbow Gardens, "An Open Book of Earth's History"
• about a kilometer's walk from the coast of Muhu island in Estonia, through junipers that were annoyingly wet
• on the grounds of the Richard B. Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard, California, scored from the Salvation Army parking lot across the street
• inside the Clifton Springs Primary School outside Geelong, Victoria, Australia ("It goes against the grain for me to step foot on school grounds during the holidays but today was an exception.")
• among a mixture of sedges, tea trees and a lot of water almost at the mangrove zone of Botany Bay, New South Wales
• outside Searchlight, Nevada, down a gas pipeline road near a solar power plant under construction
• in a harvested soybean field ("Atop a hill with a dusting of snow, we can see for many miles on this clear cold day, harvested fields in all directions")
• on state trust land in Arizona, just northeast of an unnamed 5600 foot peak on a small rise just south of an earthen dam with a little bit of water behind it
• and in Austria, beyond where the road ended by a unique privately owned "railway station" next to a farm-house, to a meadow on the hillside with a wonderful view to the surrounding mountains and villages between them