Friday, August 10, 2012

OTBR: A Ladybug by the Baltic Sea

Latitude: N 58° 34.662
Longitude: E 022° 27.960
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 a small meadow 250m from the Baltic Sea in Estonia ("The point itself was quite boring; I met a nice ladybug on the meadow though.")
  • on a hill covered in sagebrush and buckwheat along what used to be a stagecoach route from southern California's Conejo Valley down to the Oxnard Plain
  • in mature woods, with both oaks and pines, of Reserve, Wisconsin, opposite the road from cranberry bogs
  • in Tucson, Arizona, at the end of a cul-de-sac lined with palm trees and saguaro cactus
  • near the clubhouse and community pool and playground and tennis courts and trails of The Village of Dorset Park in Burlington, Vermont
  • near the 6th hole of the Bear Creek golf course in Morrison, Colorado ("There were quite a few golfers, but they paid no attention to me.")
  • in the middle of a forest in Poland ("I wanted to make a little stop, eat polish donut, and drink coffee from the vacuum flask... but too many mosquitoes here, I have to evacuate as fast as possible.")
  • in Missouri, down a seldom traveled two track in in tall grass, weeds, and brush ("Douq suggested I walk down the hill to zero the point...no way, I don't walk places where I can't see my feet.")
  • in Shannondale, Virginia, in a large tract of wooded mountain set aside as a nature preserve and wildlife management area
  • outside Philadelphia, in the yard of a house with a welcome sign in the shape of a baseball player in a Phillies uniform
  • near a yellow house in Greenville, Pennsylvania, in the yard with a hearse sitting in the weeds ("it's probably been there a long time")
  • in Tracy, California, in the yard of a house with a pair of fiberglass(?) deer
  • in a garden center in Piercebridge, UK
  • at the entrance to the Garden Place Senior Living Center in Millstadt, Illinois
  • in front of the front door of Emmanuel Bible Chapel in Foundryville, Pennsylvania
  • behind a Checkers restaurant in Maryland
  • on an island in an ornamental lake in The Arthur Westlake Memory Reserve west of Melbourne
  • along the footpath that goes over and down the river in the UK's Newbiggin wood
  • in a soy bean field in Minnesota, irrigated by a center pivot sprinkler whose nozzle was spraying across the road
  • in a flat, sandy area in typical juniper woodland with a few pine trees in Oregon's Deschutes County ("The Cascades, still with a modest amount of snow, were barely visible from the top of a rock outcrop near the dashpoint.")
  • outside Chicago, on the merge ramp that is hit from the southbound Interstate 294 merging ramp that goes to westbound I-90 ("I would guess that thousands of people, likely tens of thousands, hit the scoring zone of the dashpoint every day.")
  • and in Betterton, Maryland right on Chesapeake Bay, near a street sign with numerous arrows ("Death Valley (2666), Niagara Falls (469), San Francisco (2892), and Bozeman (2150)")

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