OTBR: California Redwoods

Latitude: N 37° 24.270
Longitude: W 122° 21.288

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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• along the narrow and twisty Tunitas Creek Road in a dense forest of redwood trees southeast of Half Moon Bay, California
• in Germany, on the left side of the river Rhein, in a large recreational park area in the (former capital) city of Bonn and Bad Godesberg
• in Alberta, Canada, on private property, on a dead end road ("it's absolutely gorgeous, with ice fog at an elevation of just over 1300 meters")
• in Queensland, down a single lane dirt lane lined with grass higher than the car, in a freshly ploughed field, visited under the BEAUTIFUL light of a full moon
• only 230 meters from the entrance to Hoover Forest Preserve outside Chicago, a park that hosts winter cabin camping for Boy Scouts
• north of Boise, Idaho, up a wide, dusty trail going up a ridge line, surrounded by low vegetation and scattered, scrubby bushes ("This time of year, the plants are still green, but it looks like the hills here get very dry in summer.")
• in an apartment car park (a couple were just heading out on their pushbikes") in Palm Beach on the coast of Queensland
• outside Derby, England, in the middle of Staker Lane, just down from White Lodge Farm
• in the middle of CA-23 freeway, about 2km from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library ("nothing to see here but the signals, medians, 'landscaping' (I use the word loosely)")
• in Estonia, on a small meadow next to a farmhouse in village Upa
• and in a very green pasture with a small creek flowing through it in fairly flat farm country in Iowa, unfortunately close to a pig farm