Sunday, September 6, 2015

OTBR: Vanishing View in Las Vegas

Latitude: N 36° 10.596
Longitude: W 115° 21.936

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".


  • in a future gated community in the larger planned community of "The Paseos" west of Las Vegas, where great views of the distant mountains are not yet blocked by new homes
  • in New Zealand, on a roadside very close to a walking and cycling track that follows the bed of the now-closed Otago Central Branch Railway Line, with paddocks all around
  • in South Africa, just over a fence, with lovely bushveld vegetation all around ("I suspect that the farmer has wild game on his farm due to the high fencing.")
  • in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City, where a 0.68 acre vacant lot is for sale for $399,000 ("a steep, rocky building lot!")
  • in a single storey brick house with an established garden in a suburban estate with plenty of land available for further development on the northern fringe of Melbourne
  • down a decently graded dirt road running parallel to I-84 in Idaho, down a not so well graded side track, and on rolling ground in scattered brush
  • on the ramp to I-80 at the airport in Salt Lake City, Utah
  • in a woods in Germany, where the hunters in their towers shoot only evil foxes and wild boars
  • in a woods south of Bucksport, Maine, near a school and nice walking/biking trails
  • in a woods in Maryland behind a recent development of large, 4-story townhouses with garages on the ground floor
  • in an empty retention ditch 21 miles south of Chicago
  • next to a large but shallow pond in Missouri, on open land full of weeds that hasn't been farmed for a long time
  • in a corn field in Minnesota where the crop is about 2 meters tall and looking fairly good
  • in a tunnel of corn south of Omaha, Nebraska ("the corn is unusually high probably due to unusually high rainfall")
  • behind the backstop of the baseball field of the Burlingame, California, high school
  • and in Minnesota, on the running track of the Hopkins campus of Blake School, a prestigious pre-K-12 private school

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