OTBR: South Mountain Creamery

Latitude: N 39° 27.918
Longitude: W 077° 36.498

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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• past the South Mountain Creamery in Maryland, in mature deciduous woods, first uphill for a bit, then over the edge of the hill and out of sight downhill
• down a stepped pathway, past lantana, weeds and burrs, along a broken retaining wall and in the water of Booker Bay in New South Wales
• west of Chicago, smack on the middle of a country road right next to an Osage Orange tree (Hedge Apple) and across from some fairly old farmhouses
• through a woods and in an open field behind the Pisgah recycling center in Maryland
• in Washington, DC, behind a two-story brick house with an addition on the right side that has tan siding
• down a snow packed gravel road in a stand of tamarack trees east of Clear Lake, Minnesota
• in a fenced off grassy paddock (Gilbertson's Grassland Nature Conservation Reserve) among large warehouses in the industrial suburb of Truganina, Victoria, Australia
• in Pennsylvania's George Washington National Forest, past the remains of a deer (the ribs were stripped, but the head, neck, and tail had not been eaten), across a stream and up the side of a ridge
• off the turn at one of the switchbacks of Licking Creek Road, a steep, rough dirt road in Pennsylvania, over the top of a mountain and down the other side, in mature woods
• in a beautiful little residential neighborhood along California's Napa River, probably on a private dock behind a house on the river
• and in a snowed-in pasture behind a white metal barn near the tiny town of Hancock, Iowa