OTBR: Woomagarma

Latitude: S 35° 52.830
Longitude: E 147° 15.114

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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• among the sheep and cattle grazing properties of Woomagarma, Victoria, Australia
• in British Columbia, beyond the end of a maintained road, beyond the limits of AWD, on with the snow boots into the forest to a steep dropoff into a gully
• in Warrandyte, a green outer northeastern suburb of Melbourne, on Everard Street which runs uphill from the Yarra River, where there is a commemorative plaque for the local Aborigninal people, the Wurundjeri
• on the South Gippsland freeway southeast of Melbourne, near a farm selling eggs (Maytime Poultry Farm)
• south of Baltimore, near a white Cape Cod-style house with a detached garage on the right and two tiers of wooden beams used as a retention wall in front
• on a road through an apartment complex in Randallstown, Maryland, near a wall leading down to a water retention pond
• in a single level cream brick house in a fairly new suburb of Canberra ("it was so hot, 42 degrees, we didn't linger to get any closer.")
• on the Hume Highway north of Melbourne, in a grassy paddock scattered with gum trees and cavorting magpies
• in a muddy and snowy unfenced soybean field in Nebraska
• near the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, in a fallow corn field with a small but steep hill with a rocky top
• in Austria, in a corn field on highway S36 called "Murtalschnellstraße" between the small towns "Sankt Stefan" and "Kraubath"
• in typical Illinois prairie in a field lined with a series of nice old concrete posts, usage unknown
• in Victoria, on the Great Ocean Road directly over a tunnel provided to transport herds of cows under the road for milking purposes
• in some private, semi-industrial land in Nebraska, near a man-made pond with lots of Canada geese
• on the ice of Minnesota's Lake Mille Lacs, but close enough to the shore to be scored from MN-18 ("There are hundreds of ice fishing houses on the lake now.")
• in Nebraska, surrounded by sand pits which have been turned into lakes for recreation and backdrops for McMansions
• on a golf course in rural central Illinois ("It looked a bit ragged.")
• behind the homeowners association clubhouse on the grounds of Mayfield residential subdivision of Milpitas, California
• and in a meadow 900 meters from Estonia's Kau Manor ("At once a nature preserve, boutique hotel and restaurant, art center and academy, Kau Manor is devoted to nurturing beauty and nourishing artists, aesthetes and adventurers of all kinds.")