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Longitude: W 115° 08.556
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".
- on vacant land that will eventually become part of the Inspirada master planned community in Henderson, Nevada
- south of Birmingham, England, off Poolhead Road inside the boundary of a house called Lodge Farm
- near Elk River, Minnesota, in the yard of a home with a flagpole flying the Star Spangled Banner of the USA above a POW/MIA flag
- in northern Wisconsin, in a second growth forest of pine, birch, and aspen about 5 km from the south shore of Lake Superior
- near Thousand Oaks, California, in the right-hand lane of the east-bound side of the residential Lynn Road ("all one can see is a high bank of ivy and junipers")
- in an empty paddock in the lush hilly area known as The Dandenongs east of Melbourne ("a wooden cottage was adjacent to the paddock in this idyllic location")
- in Mt Disappointment National Park, Victoria, Australia, an area notorious for the 2009 bushfires that devastated the surrounding countryside
- near Woodbine, Maryland, about 90 meters up a long driveway lined with 6 foot high lights to a house with white siding and black shutters and a railing along the large front porch
- in the pristine desert in the State Trust Land north of Tucson ("the only man-made structures I could see in all directions were the road, a small pond to the west and the tip of a tower to the south")
- outside a single-level cream brick house on Kangaroo Hills Road in Smeaton, Victoria, Australia, an historic gold-mining town
- in Bannockburn, England, near the base of a new pylon for a high-voltage overhead line under construction to carry electrical energy south from Scotland's growing number of wind turbines
- in the middle of the slow lane of California Highway 84 east just before it meets up with the Hwy 880 interchange ("just about the time you're reading the big green signs to see which lane ends up going north to Oakland or south to San Jose, you're passing right over the dashpoint")
- in north St Louis County, in a nice neighborhood of 1950s single story houses with well-kept yards ("the house with the dashpoint had several signs warning of video surveillance, guard dogs and guns")
- in a soybean field overlooking a wooded ravine between Omaha and Kansas City
- near Strawberry Reservoir in the Uinta National Forest in the middle of hundreds of acres of thick sagebrush ("one sagebrush had the audacity to actually grab my ankle and trip me")
- at the west end of Triesdorf/Weidenbach, Germany, just past the market square, next to a house with a solar array on the roof
- and on the edge of a meadow, next to a compost pile in Estonia
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