Tuesday, April 5, 2016

OTBR: Perpendicular Point in New South Wales

Latitude: S 31° 38.508
Longitude: E 152° 50.700

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 the rocks or in the Pacific Ocean 33 meters below the cliff on the Perpendicular Point headland in New South Wales's Kattang Nature Reserve
  • in central Thailand, on the grounds of a large private school for ethnic Chinese Thais
  • in Maryland, in the woods behind the George Washington Carver Elementary School
  • in the Florida panhandle, in open woods, with just low ground cover between the trees, all pine with some areas of very evenly-spaced trees from replantings
  • in Estonia, on a small, unpaved forest road covered in lots of snow
  • in Utah, at 6200 feet, over a pretty good sized hill covered with juniper and pinion pine rather than the typical sagebrush
  • west of Melbourne, in scrubby forest with large wombat burrows ("we could see their distinctive 'fairy footstool' scat everywhere")
  • in an unfenced cornfield in Nebraska, just off a minimum maintenance unpaved road 685 meters from the highway
  • in West Virginia, on land recently cleared of a big patch of woods and planted in grape vines
  • in a cornfield near Davenport, Iowa ("or at least dirt where there once used to be corn. It's now a bunch of cut off stalks and some old rotted cobs.")
  • in Illinois, just east of the Mississippi River and within a cloverleaf exit of I-270
  • in central Thailand, on the grounds of the National Sports Training Center
  • in Chicago, in the yard of a tiny one-story house with about as much yard space as the average San Francisco home
  • near a kitch letterbox shaped like a koala in a very plain neighborhood of Cranbourne, one of the fastest growing outer suburbs of Melbourne
  • in Virginia's tidewater country, in flooded lowlands along Pepper Mill Creek
  • north of Bangkok, about 140 meters along an elevated path along a canal ("klong")
  • just inside the Crown Healthcare building, a long low tan brick building in Pensacola, Florida
  • in San Leandro, California, in an Amazon distribution warehouse ("of a dark, don't-look-at-me industrial gray color with no obvious signage out front")
  • and west of Bangkok, near a corner where a woman was frying chicken on a handcart for nearby factory workers

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