Saturday, December 5, 2015

OTBR: The Little Chapel at Rottman

Latitude: N 48° 14.448
Longitude: E 011° 57.552

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".


  • near a little chapel on an abandoned farm northeast of Munich, Germany
  • alongside the Ashford Park Horse Agistment property near a large split rock that gives Split Rock Road its name in the green rolling hills east of Melbourne
  • in a paddock on a horse farm in Missouri ("here paddock almost always means an area where horses are trained and/or allowed to graze")
  • 150 km west of Melbourne, in a large paddock containing a dry dam, some merino sheep and a brown alpaca to guard them
  • at a T-intersection in Oxnard, California, near a field of artichokes, several hectares of them
  • on a dirt road between the trees of an orchard north of Bakersfield, California
  • in Missouri, in a field left with corn stubble several inches tall that had not yet been plowed under
  • west of Modesto, California, and out of reach behind the fences of Teichert Aggregates, where trucks were coming in and going out, collecting rocks and sand
  • on the sand dunes on Ocean Beach just southwest of Golden Gate park in San Francisco
  • on the California coast near Santa Barbara, on the grounds of the private Cate School, out of reach behind a very new set of security gates
  • in Zagreb, Croatia, under a bridge on the bank of the Sava River
  • in a field near the small village of Klos, Poland, between Sianów and Koszalin
  • just off the Bay Area Ridge Trail near Huddart County Park in the hills near Redwood City, California
  • in Virginia, in a recent development called Occoquan Overlook, consisting of huge homes on large lots scraped clean of all the surrounding trees
  • in Riverside, California, down a dirt road beyond the end of the paved road, beyond which lay several largish homes at the foot of Box Springs Mountain
  • on slightly sloping bajada of California's Mojave Desert, empty land that's part of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station
  • off of I-10 east of Riverside, California, near a nature preserve that was once a Lockheed research-and-testing facility and once used to decommission nuclear weapons
  • on ranch land in central California, on a dirt road beyond a gate with no signage, among a large flock of sheep
  • off a narrow road near Los Alamos, California, up a steep cut-bank amongst a nice stand of oaks
  • and west of Omahao, on a steep hill with plenty of snow from Nebraska's first snowfall of the season

No comments: