Longitude: E 023° 32.772
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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".
- 100 meters from the coastline in Estonia, through a forest laid with a carpet of tasty cowberries and blueberries
- in Hungary, down a dirt road, in a grassy field on a small hill surrounded by trees, reached by bicycle
- in Michigan, along an incredibly bumpy and sandy road, in mixed evergreen and hardwoods with ground ferns
- in a cornfield next to a gravel road in Michigan ("Passed many blueberry farms and cherry orchards")
- in a soybean field in Michigan ("Passed numerous apple orchards and cider mills")
- in Michigan (northern tip of lower peninsula) off a gravel road near a vineyard
- in the Hiawatha Forest of Michigan's upper peninsula, down a good gravel road through a green tunnel into thick but barely passable forest and ferns
- in Tucson, on the street between a high school football stadium and a trailer park
- near Frederick, Maryland, in the woods along Lingamore Creek behind the Whispering Creek development of townhomes
- a half mile hike down a very steep trail from a campground in California's Yosemite National Park
- in the parking lot of a large supermarket in Zagreb, Croatia ("I took one picture of ground zero location and caught some pokemons.")
- in a cornfield off a gravel road near Darwin, Minnesota, home to a twine museum (home to "The World's Largest Twine Ball Made By One Man!")
- in downtown Las Vegas ("Marriage Capital of the World") across the street from the county marriage license bureau
- in Minnesota, in a two-story house with a nice stone entryway on the shore of Lake Riley
- in Virginia, off Bust Head Road, in heavy woods, steadily uphill toward the top of a ridge line
- in New York, in a field next to the playground of Whitehall Elementary School
- in Melton South, west of Melbourne, in new estate, lush and green with a waterway running through a central linear park
- on the street in front of a golf course in Ames, Iowa
- in Nebraska, down a unpassable minimum maintenance road with plenty of sunflowers, partridge pea and chicory along the way
- in a field in Iowa, near the Five Mile House, a "Schuetzen Verein" (shooting club) organized in May, 1883
- on a gravel road outside Warsaw within sight of a mast with a stork nest
- down a dirt road in Georgia, in a hay field with nice green grass
- in Georgia, in a thick stand of tall pine trees, about a mile down a gravel road from an open lot where once there was a house but now there is only a chimney
- in dense woods in the north Georgia mountains, in an area with many vacation homes that sit well back from the road and are hard to see
- in Tennessee, in an open field next to a cemetery behind Hopewell Baptist Church
- in Kentucky, on Rowland Cemetery Road, in a grove of trees that lined a creek across a field of tall grass
- in Kentucky, along an abandoned road in the woods off the Woodlands Trace National Scenic Byway in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area
- in Kansas, in an overgrown area, just shy of a bridge crossing Bitter Creek, near a butterfly bush buzzing with bees and monarch and swallowtail butterflies
- on a rural road in southern Illinois ("We stopped with an iconic view of Illinois farmland, corn on our right, tall and tasseled out almost ready for harvest. The road went straight ahead and the telephone poles lined up in a row, gradually getting smaller as they got further away from us.")
- in Kansas, on one of the holes of Mission Hills Country Club ("swanky enough by itself, but the nearby homes getting here were like out of a movie")
- in Oklahoma, just off the highway lined with many pecan trees with lots of webworms ("I heard gunshots when I got out to take a picture.")
- near an abandoned private swimming pool outside Palmdale, California
- near Colorado's western border, down a dirt road in the parking lot at the Rabbit Ear trailhead
- in Wagoner, Oklahoma, in the yard of a house with a big pile of debris from a recent evil storm
- on a dirt road that leads to Tulsa's Port City Raceway, a track for midget car racing
- in the middle of nowhere western Oklahoma - not much but cattle and oil and gas, almost no farming
- in Kansas, in a sorghum field just north of Rose Meron cemetery
- in Illinois, smack in the middle of fully mature but unharvested seed corn
- in Thailand, in tropical woods off a dirt road, with occasional houses and rice paddies along the way
- in Laos, off of the road to Kuang Si Falls, a major tourist attraction, down a narrow dirt track, across a small stream, and in dense woods
- west of Siem Reap, Cambodia, in a rice paddy in an area mostly covered in rice, and with this being the rainy season, everything is a bright green
- outside Talinn, Estonia, reachable by bus, in the middle of a meadow near a big yellow field of rapeseed, with dewberries, gooseberries and wood sorrel in the forest
- and in the middle of a one-way alley west of Tehran lined with dense and new apartments
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