OTBR: A Pond at Latrobe University

Latitude: S 37° 43.308
Longitude: E 145° 02.754

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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• on the edge of a small lake on the campus of Latrobe University in Melbourne
• down a grassy hill by the observatory of the University Western Sydney (Werrington North/Penrith) Campus
• in the sports stadium parking of the private school of Nazareth Academy in Western Springs, Illinois
• in Oklahoma, in the yard of a rundown white house with many vehicles, across the road from a rundown brown brick building with a "Bingo Every Friday" sign
• on the long driveway leading to the Bulverde Area Humane Society Animal Shelter north of San Antonio
• in Agoura Hills, California, on a hillside in a neighborhood park with a nice playground, walking paths, trees, and a very large grass area good for flying kites and tossing frisbees
• in Michigan on I-69 next to the Lapeer Country Club golf course ("stunning this time of year with the change of the leaves")
• on the "Easts Leisure & Golf Club" outside Newcastle, New South Wales, by a pond with what sounded like all of the frogs from the plague of the Egyptian Pharaoh
• in Kansas, on the westbound side if I-70, surrounded by grasslands and farms
• in the forest beside Blueskin Road just out of Dunedin, New Zealand
• in a large shed at a farmstead in Minnesota, in an area where about half of the corn fields and all of the soybean fields are harvested
• in very flat Oklahoma farmland, with dusty unharvested soybeans in the field on one side and pretty green winter wheat on the other side
• in a field of alfalfa and oil wells in Oklahoma
• 260 meters uphill in a field full of sheep in South Downs National Park near Southampton, England
• in a grassy field across the road from an alpaca farm in the Dorset Area of Natural Beauty in southern England
• in the front yard of a brick and stone new home in an exburb subdivision of Oklahoma City ("big homes on spacious lots with lots of trees in a slightly hilly area")
• outside the village of Brogwyn, Wales, down a single track road with poor pavement, just past a huge old tree and just on the other side of a hedgerow
• in New South Wales, in a weed-infested section of scrub the other side of a jumble of boulders near a sign "This is a Friends of the Bush Restoration Project"
• in Illinois, in a farm field covered with birds, probably starlings, gleaning corn left over from the harvest
• west of Melbourne, a short walk through the tall thin gums of a eucalypt plantation
• in Prunedale, California, behind dense trees and greenery that prevent seeing what's actually at the zero point ("it probably involves more of the aforementioned trees and greenery")
• next to Emmanuel Episcopal Church in St. Louis, near a plaque built into the wall showing the original date of the church, 1866
• in Pennsylvania, beyond the back of the parking lot for the Rawlinsville United Methodist Church, a very plain red brick building
• and on the Melliodora Miniature Goat Farm outside Melbourne, Australia, visited on the day that the Curse of the Billy Goat was broken and the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series in 108 years