OTBR: London's Langthorne Park

Latitude: N 51° 33.318
Longitude: E 000° 00.198

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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• inside an apartment building in London, across from Langthorne Park with a little pond with a tiny island with a gazebo and a mosaic with a dragon motif
• near the front door of Galilee Korean Church in Rotorua, New Zealand
• in the middle of a field in front of a massive house on the coast of the island of Jersey, a Crown dependency off the coast of Normandy
• in New South Wales, down a dirt and rutted track, called Baldwins Track, in the open bush of Kumbatine National Park
• in southern California, in mostly high-desert juniper scrub with a few pine trees, just north of Frazier Mountain Park Road, near an abortive development of cabins, called Juniper Ridge ("the gate and fence are all that stands")
• in an open, fenced field in Maryland, home to an old brick structure in the field of unknown origin or purpose
• at the edge of a park in Pasadena, Maryland, that is home to four baseball fields, of different sizes, to accommodate ages from 4 years to 15
• in a single story brick house, past the horse club, aerodrome, golf club and shooting club all interspersed with some pretty poor neighbourhoods in Porto Alegre, Brazil
• on a major street next to a martial arts gym in Germany
• in the parking lot of an ice arena in Minnesota
• in British Columbia, in the heart of ranch country so the ground is open with only a few patches of trees
• just off the Claremont Hills Wilderness Trail in California
• in rolling hills of the Yarra Valley northeast of Melbourne ("very green and lush with many fruit growing and cattle grazing properties")
• in a cul de sac in a new subdivision south of Omaha, Nebraska, with a nice mixture of homes, all large, a few very large, all with the same basic look ("not quite McMansions")
• in a cul de sac on a quiet suburban street of neat brick houses adjoining Altona Reservoir southwest of Melbourne
• on US Rt. 67 in Missouri, a major highway with fairly heavy traffic on a holiday weekend, near a side road to Paw Paw Campground
• in a generally flat area with lush green paddocks southeast of Melbourne ("I was taking photos of about twenty black steers when two horse riders trotted down the road. One was dressed as a real cowgirl wearing a white stetson hat and the full regalia.")
• in the western portion of Utah's Uinta Mountains not far from the Wolf Creek pass/summit
• a long way down some dirt roads in Missouri to a "hollow," a small flat area between hills that is good for farming
• a mile down a dirt road, in deep woods inside Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest
• down a dirt road south of Pueblo, Colorado, near an abandoned and weathered farm site collapsing from age and disuse and a gated driveway with an elk and quail on either sides of a double gate
• in Missouri, in front of a vineyard with neat rows of grape arbors
• in England, down a single track road ("more like a 3/4 track road") past the village of Cerney Wick ("chartered in AD 999, according to the sign")
• north of Duchesne, Utah, in sagebrush terrain not far from the municipal airport, near a driveway that goes to a mobile home
• and in Fremont, California, in a mobile home with an orange and black "San Francisco Giants World Champions" banner proudly displayed out front