OTBR: A Broken Stone Fence in Australia

Latitude: S 37° 34.422
Longitude: E 145° 07.176

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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• across a low broken stone fence in an area of housing estates and hobby farms north of Melbourne
• in front of a red brick row house with a white iron fence in Brooklyn
• along a driveway to a modern style log house in Minnesota with a nearby rectangular pond, probably excavated for fill for the house's foundation
• in an eastern suburb of Melbourne, along the aptly named street Shady Grove, in front of a brick house with a shabby, over-run garden
• in a modern residential neighborhood of Rheinbach, Germany, where kids were playing footie in the garden
• at a house in suburban Salt Lake City with light tan aluminum siding, red shutters, a red door and green grass
• near a nice manor house in Krapina-Zagorje County, Croatia
• on a tree-lined road in Atherton, California, lined with some of the area's smaller mansions all hidden behind hedges and trees (e.g., 5 BR, 5 1/2 baths, 7,884 sq feet, $8.9 million)
• 600 meters across dirt-that-will-soon-be-houses in Henderson, Nevada, outside Las Vegas
• on a two-lane gravel road in a Minnesota national forest of mixed woods, mostly birch
• in the arid New Mexico desert along NM-338 about 4 miles off I-10, scored on the way to zip-lining at Ski Apache
• along a narrow dirt road west of Melbourne, in a paddock with no animals ("On the way in we saw horses, sheep, goats, alpacas and cattle as well as a dead wombat and three dead kangaroos.")
• in beautiful Pennsylvania farm country with rolling hills planted with corn
• in a field with knee-high corn in Minnesota's Drift-less Zone, because it was not flattened by the last ice age, leaving well developed drainage patterns and deep valleys
• in Iowa, in a field with still very young soybeans ("There has been unusually high rainfall so many fields have not been planted.")
• out of reach in a military area of New South Wales ("DANGER - Military Range Boundary - Live Firing")
• south of St. Louis, near Mastodon State Historic Site, in back of a house that sat up pretty high with a wide, sloping lawn down to the road
• in New South Wales among some lovely tree ferns on the edge of a precipice where you could see eagles soaring at the same height through the trees
• and in the dense woods of the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, just south of the site of the crash on September 11, 2001