OTBR: A Swamp in Estonia

Latitude: N 59° 06.336
Longitude: E 024° 45.342

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 Estonia, in a small lake in a swamp that is part of Rabivere nature reserve ("It was cold and windy and cloudy, but not raining. At least not in the beginning. At least not heavily. I spent there 8 hours outside in nature.")
• in open desert in an undeveloped quad between Tucson and Phoenix
• in a dried-up pond in central California, surrounded by broken and dumped television sets that used to be underwater
• north of Melbourne, in a large flat paddock with very high tufts of grass and plenty of mud and water lying around due to the heavy rains over the past few weeks ("The drought is well and truly over!")
• on the big island of Hawaii, near the historic homes on the Parker Ranch, at 250,000 acres one of the USA's largest ranches
• in a farm paddock just of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand
• in Utah, 250 meters from a jeep trail with fist-sized stones mixed with sand, on a ridge running up a wash
• in gold-colored grass covering the hills in California's Gold Country east of La Grange, California
• in a dried out, but not harvested corn field in Iowa
• only a couple of meters off the roadway by a house for sale ("In interior British Columbia with so much wilderness and mountainous terrain not too many like this."
• in a back yard outside of Chicago, in the Brookeridge Subdivision and Brookeridge Airpark, adjoined areas where residents have their own private airplane hangers as attached garages ("Fly in Homes")
• in Virginia, behind a Family Dollar store in woods behind a Candlewood Suites hotel
• in Rose Hill, Virginia, out of sight, inside a tall, unpainted wood fence
• a short walk up a hill in the middle of a residential back yard in Kelowna, British Columbia
• at a small, abandoned and boarded up house, painted red, an exception to this St. Louis neighborhood that is mostly neat and inviting ("We saw barbeque smokers out and cooking. There would be a good group of well-fed people here later on.")
• and behind a historic pub and inn called The Cock and Rabbit Inn in the small English village of The Lee "A new sign says they are donating money from each meal to relief efforts for the Italian earthquake")