OTBR: Saguaro with a Helping Hand

Latitude: N 32° 40.848
Longitude: W 111° 11.736

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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• in pristine Arizona desert, across sandy washes and along miles of narrow double tracks near a saguaro extending a helping arm to a palo verde tree
• in a forest near the village of Kleszczyniec, Poland
• 440 meters down a very narrow gravel drive in Maryland leading to a single house well out of sight down the lane
• in nice and flat desert terrain in California, which had dried up very quickly after recent rains
• in a quaint community at the base of some rather rugged looking hills outside of Palm Springs, California
• next to the Castlewood Baptist Church, which is nestled in the woods at the bottom of some hills west of St. Louis
• up a steep hill in thick bush in Lysterfield Park east of Melbourne
• in the Burrawan State Forest in New South Wales, not far away from the iconic "Old Bottlebutt" tree
• just into the trees at a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania
• in Manti, Utah, in a residential yard fenced with chain link with privacy slats installed
• in an orchard in California where farmers were running machinery up and down between the trees
• in central California on a hilltop with views of an orchard below and some boxed beehives
• in a lakeside lot of Garden Lake in Wisconsin's Chequamegon National Forest (setting for "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle")
• on Wisconsin Highway 13, just east of the bridge over the Iron River and just south of Lake Superior
• and in Illinois, next to a small creek that flows into the mighty Mississippi ("I walked thru the beginning of the autumn deluge of leaves, crunching under my feet.")