Longitude: W 094° 18.120
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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".
- in Iowa on a lonely dead-end road with a falling down abandoned house and various bits of ranching machinery in fields with open gates
- in Victoria, Australia, on a local bike path in the George Andrews Reserve, an extensive sporting complex
- just off I-66 in Virginia, with the Fair Oaks mall to the north and the Fairfax Corner mall to the south
- along the railroad tracks in West Virginia, near a couple of mostly decomposed/eaten deer carcasses lying next to a telephone pole
- in Pennsylvania, down dead-end Kuhn Fording Road, on grass, downhill from the road near the narrow band of trees along the stream
- in Iowa, near an apparently abandoned farmhouse, although there are various farm buildings, mostly silos, in active use nearby
- northwest of Melbourne, in a quite beautiful area with hilly surroundings, gullies, native bushland, and a natural thermal springs
- west of Melbourne, in flat grazing land scattered with stands of gums, with the zero spot marked by a stack of hay bales
- in a very barren harvested soybean field in the flat Missouri River floodplain just at the base of the Loess Hills
- west of Chicago, within site of the stadium lights for the home of the Kane County Cougars, Class A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks
- in the parking lot of a once nice, probably close to 75-year-old brick apartment complex in Buffalo, New York
- in Arkansas, off a narrow road on top of a hill in the yard of a house close to a large lake and a recreational area with lots of cedar trees around
- in wooded area just off the highway in Arkansas's Gunner Pool Recreation Area in Ozark-St Francis National Forest
- on a narrow paved road in hilly mixed farming and ranching in Missouri ("There were llamas and alpacas along with two very large Great Pyrenees dogs who tried their best to climb in the car.")
- on a lane between wineries in the flat agricultural lands near Rimini, Italy, heading towards the mountains
- near the Guadalupe Reservoir dam, amid green, tree-covered hills that feel quite remote despite being only 15 kilometers south of downtown San Jose, California
- and on the road leading into a cattle feeding operation in Missouri ("Saw massive amounts of henbit blooming in fields so that it appeared to be carpeted in rosy lavender carpet. Frogs in drainage ditches were singing so loud we could hear them with closed car windows as we zoomed by.")
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