Monday, January 4, 2010

OTBR: The Driveway into Warrawee Therapies

Latitude: 38.373100° S
Longitude: 145.113098° E

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".


  • on uncultivated and barren grassland near the Sevier Bridge Reservoir dam in central Utah
  • near the base of a large mulberry tree that is near the dividing line between two houses in La Verne, California ("one house had a lot of Christmas lights: multi-colored strands along the eave of the roof, and lots of white icicle-style strings hanging from the roof")
  • in a white weatherboard house in Dandenong, Victoria, with a few garden gnomes crowding up the front yard
  • in Missouri, next to a barbed wire fence surrounding a farm field that has been worked on, as it appears suburbia is taking over and some new buildings are going to be placed here but for now, agriculture is still king
  • in California, just inside a three-strand barbed-wire fence that surrounds a vacant lot ("not much of interest inside the fence: just some dead grasses. We heard a goat bleating from the house to the north")
  • in Victoria, Australia, next door to Warrawee Therapies which offers Osteopathy, Reflexology, Beauty Therapy and various forms of Massage
  • in Ohio, a mere twenty feet south of the right-hand lane of I-480 Eastbound (but, due to rush hour traffic and inclement weather, difficult to "score")
  • unreachable in a big, plowed field in Hungary ("At the point where I would have liked to see a path, a white stony holy cross! Nice area, bad weather, no luck this time.")
  • in Oregon, at the head of a drainage covered in oak trees, along a narrow road that dropped into a shaded gully where there was a thin layer of snow the sun had not reached
  • among scattered farmhouses among National Forest land in Missouri, with snow sometimes mostly covering the ground, sometimes just enough to see among the blades of grass
  • and in Austria, in a beautiful winter landscape, along a small snow-covered county road that gets even smaller the further up it leads

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