OTBR: Ice in Estonia

Latitude: N 58° 32.784
Longitude: E 023° 22.398

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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• in the woods near the edge of a meadow on the coastal plains of the island of Muhu in Estonia
• in the corner of Ohlendorf West County Park, west of St. Louis, at the end of 350 meters of hilly walking through open lands, woods, and across a stream ("a nice hike on a chilly Saturday morning")
• near a great oak along an educational trail (Jindrova naucna stezka) in the valley created by Hamersky brook in the Czech Republic
• out of reach down poorly maintained logging roads in Capitol State Forest west of Olympia, Washington ("It was raining and clouds hung low, just above the trees. The wet climate made the woods heavy with moss which added to the eerie feeling.")
• in Salem, Utah, in a farm yard filled with old, broken-down equipment along with some newer equipment that was being repaired and prepared for spring farm work
• in a steep ravine in Tacoma, Washington, an interesting wild spot in the middle of the urban jungle
• not too far from a rickety wooden slab bridge over a roaring flooding creek near Tamban, New South Wales
• in the median of Australia's Pacific Highway (A1) about midway between Sydney and Brisbane
• in Virginia, down a dead end road that ends at Bull Run, lined with large homes on large properties set far back off the road
• behind a brown stucco house with saguaro cactus and a mesquite tree in a yard of brown rock gravel, on the green for one of the holes of Tucson's Starr Pass Golf Club
• near a one-story ranch style home, with an orange brick front, in a fairly new subdivision southwest of Chicago, HighPoint Estates and Golf Club
• in Trafalgar, Victoria, Australia, in a new residential area of single storey brick homes, with a few empty blocks spread through it. ("The dashpoint block was overgrown with long grass and there was a sign on the fence advertising 'NEED A BLOCK MOWED?'")
• behind a white two-story home with avocado green trim on a quiet cul-de-sac in a residential part of Hayward, California
• inside the police station in the heart of the historic township of Trentham in the goldfield region of Victoria, Australia
• and in the "gorgeous rough-and-tumble" Mojave Desert outside Joshua Tree, California