OTBR: A Temple in Pearland

Latitude: N 29° 31.362
Longitude: W 095° 17.712

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 (not actually) last month that are "off the blue roads".

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• across the street from the magnificent Sri Meenakshi Devasthanam Temple in Pearland, Texas ("awe inspiring")
• just off the road in southern Maryland with dense woods and scattered driveways on either side
• in a field of young sugar cane south of a dirt field road in rural Thailand
• on a runway at US Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego ("If you have the security clearance to go there, be prepared to dodge some fighter jets.")
• on the Via della Costa near a sporting field in the small town of Uzzana in the province of Pistoia, Tuscany
• in featureless Iowa farm country ("Hilly enough the fields are heavily contoured so might be more interesting from the air.")
• just outside a small church cemetery in rural Neelyton, Pennsylvania
• within range of the flyover bridge over Highway 1 for the bypass of Saraburi, Thailand
• behind a two-story house in Maryland with a large 2nd floor balcony, a utility shed, a large RV, a small auto trailer, and a shelter where they apparently split firewood
• southeast of Melbourne, where a footpath (Redgum Avenue) meets Hall Rd, a residential street with mature gum trees planted in the centre strip
• in southern Illinois, in a wooded and swampy area not far from the confluence of two mighty rivers, the Ohio and the Mississippi
• off of a named street but really a dead-end driveway outside Omaha, Nebraska, with an astonishing panorama of the Missouri River and the farm down below with horses
• in rural Illinois, next to an old railroad in a field covered with butterweed ("It covered a lot of fields in this trip, sometimes creating beautiful blankets of bright yellow.")
• out of reach (without paying for a round of golf) on the course of Illinois's Schaumburg Golf Club
• off a rough and weedy tractor road along the banks of the stream leading to a cultivated field in the Loess Hills, the closest to "wilderness" you can find in Iowa
• exactly on the road from Tallinn to Paldiski, Estonia, which had quite heavy traffic
• behind an abandoned Orchard Supply Hardware store in Vacaville, California ("The nursery, which was kept outdoors under a flimsy roof of netting, now looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie.")
• in a small neighborhood park on the edge of suburbia, a few kilometers from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California
• in Virginia, unreachable inside a gated community called Walden
• and in a forest in Estonia just 2.5km from the sea ("so I took a walk and went to the beach. It was cold and windy, but still nice and relaxing.")