OTBR: The New Virginia Avenue Tunnel

Latitude: N 38° 52.710
Longitude: W 076° 59.694
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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• nestled between of two overpasses of I-695 in southeast Washington, DC, next to the cut that will become the new Virginia Avenue Tunnel
• up an unclimbable hill north of Summit Road in Los Gatos, California
• along a fenced off trail going up a snowy slope in Vernon, British Columbia
• in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, at a crossing of the Bellarine Rail Trail, a disused railway line converted into a track for walkers, bicycles and horse-riders.
• just about 100 meters inside a gated community south of Phoenix, Arizona
• in Maryland, in mature woods just past a 2.5 story house with a stone facade, a full first floor, a second floor popping up through a sloping roof, and small third floor
• in Pennsylvania, just off Golf Lane that runs through Manada Golf Club
• in a side yard on good ol' Dibble Drive, near a yucca plant, in one of the many tendrils of suburbia reaching out into rural Georgia
• on Kidder Drive outside Norfolk, Virginia, with a small lake with fountain on one side and a row of houses on the other with the attached garage of each house joined to the attached garage of the next house
• near Los Alamos, California, in a dry meadow dotted with large, gnarly interior live oaks
• in a back yard of a house outside of Simpsonville, South Carolina, with a large inflatable Snoopy Christmas decoration
• inside an empty large industrial building just of I-55 in Bolingbrook, Illinois
• in rural northern Madison County, Illinois, in a field that has been harvested and plowed under