OTBR: Piojo Ranch in New Mexico

Latitude: N 35° 48.582
Longitude: W 104° 58.998

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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• beyond the entrance to Piojo Ranch in New Mexico
• in Victoria, Australia, in a steep gully in undulating countryside with many green paddocks and wattle trees just coming into bloom
• in Sunnyvale, California, in a very industrial area, with old warehouses on the east and an air conditioning service center on the west
• across the street from Kaimhill Primary School in Aberdeen, Scotland
• on a playground at the Barnum Children's Center in Barnum, Minnesota
• very close to a Zebra crossing northwest of Manchester, England, with cars parked all around waiting for various schools in the area to finish for the day
• out of reach on the grounds of Mooseheart Child City in Batavia, Illinois, a residential child care facility for children and teens in need
• in a large, older home converted to student housing in Provo, Utah, home to Brigham Young University
• behind Porkey's, an adult entertainment business in the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri
• outside Liverpool, across from a recreation ground with rugby pitches ("a nice link because the Rugby World Cup is being held in the UK at the moment")
• under a string of electric wires crossing Main Street, a.k.a. National Trails Highway, a.k.a. Historic Route 66 in Barstow, California ("Get your kicks on Route Sixty-Six")
• on a rural highway in grasslands southeast of Denver, where a Cowboy church service was being readied just south of the point
• just outside the front door of a mobile home at the King's Row RV and Mobile Park in Las Vegas, Nevada
• near the base of the Mary Jane Falls trail on Mount Charleston, near Las Vegas, Nevada (an 'easy' drive-by, where 'easy' requires driving 20 miles uphill to the point")
• in Maryland, behind a chain link fence with a sign offering a $2,500 reward for information to arrest and conviction of people dumping on this property
• inside a furniture and home store in downtown Montreal
• over rolling terrain, past sand traps and greens, to the fence bordering the woods along Cloverdale Links Gold Course in Ontario
• along a cut near Derby, England, with boats lined up on either side of the canal where the waterway is a bit wider than normal
• in a flat field planted in grain in a very definitely rural part of Quebec with nothing but farms all around, with a few scattered houses
• in a hay field east of River Falls, Wisconsin
• in Arizona's Tortolita Preserve near a pair of intertwined saguaros surrounded by very lush desert as a result of the plentiful monsoon rains
• in Illinois in a field of soybeans that were just starting to turn yellow
• in New York, in woods running along a little stream next to a corn field
• off dirt a dirt road, next to a corn field in Ontario ("They raise pigs here, and you can smell them half a km before getting there.")
• 16 meters into the corn of an unharvested corn field in Illinois
• out of reach beyond a gate in an abandoned strip mine of long narrow hilly strips of tailings interspersed with long narrow fingers of depressed land that sometimes hold water
• and on California Route 1 through the Big Sur where the highway runs along a massive cut well above the sea