OTBR: Gus Grissom Road

Latitude: N 29° 30.726
Longitude: W 095° 08.682

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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• outside Houston, home of the Johnson Space Center, along Gus Grissom Rd on the way to the Challenger Seven Memorial Park
• in Henderson, Nevada, along the Pittman Wash trail, the wash having just a bare trickle of water in it
• on Maryland's Eastern Shore, along a wooded stream that flows through mostly large open farm fields
• in a pond across the road from northern California's Ironstone Winery and its acres of wine grapes
• outside Melbourne, among the many factories, warehouses and truck operating facilities in the bayside suburb of Altona
• in Minnesota's Chippewa National Forest along a gravel road that winds along a ridge with mixed pine and birch trees on both sides of the road
• on the outskirts of Glenwood, Iowa, in a dense thicket near a dirt road with an underpass where Warren Buffett's train (BNSF) was passing over
• in the Wallamba Nature Reserve of New South Wales, along a logging track in typical forest that has been logged
• in Pennsylvania, in some woods with a farm field next to it, with everything pretty wet from recent rain ("Saw some chipmunks but that's about it.")
• in German woods ("There wasn't much to see, wood, trees, and us himself. But we did a little picnic and the kids has found sticks bigger as they are! We take some pictures and leave nothing but footprints.")
• in Virginia, in a grassy field used for parking on race days at Langley Speedway, a NASCAR race track
• in Virginia's Naval Supply Center Cheatham Annex, on a little peninsula with a creek on one side and a lake on the other
• outside Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, on a dirt track just past three stream crossings among scattered, scrubby bushes and grasses, fairly green from all the recent rain
• in the village of Haeska, Estonia, in the middle of a field, freshly sowed, with soil rolled hard and sparsely covered with white granules of fertilizer
• in a very green paddock with a herd of cows at the very far end, 160 km west of Melbourne along the Hamilton Highway
• in Limeburners Creek Nature Preserve in New South Wales, along a flooded track, then tightly packed coastal scrub ("a good obstacle course for any country's Special Forces!")
• and outside Chicago, in corn stubble on the edge of the Risen Lord Cemetery (scored on the fifteenth anniversary of the removal of Selective Availability, the act that made civilian GPS accurate enough for Geodashing).