OTBR: Great Melbourne Telescope

Latitude: S 35° 17.952
Longitude: E 148° 55.278
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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• in Canberra, near the Mount Stromlo Observatory, containing the burnt remains of the Great Melbourne Telescope which was destroyed in a bushfire in 2003
• near Los Alamos, California, up a slope on the east side of the road, with a canyon carved by a seasonal creek opposite
• across the street from the green and well-groomed Oaktree Park in Tucson, Arizona
• in Victoria, Australia, in an empty paddock containing a dam and a country windmill turning slowly
• in Fayetteville, North Carolina, between the Williford Seafood Company and the Cape Fear River, near the Rednecks Yacht Club
• in southern Victoria, Australia, near an abandoned dairy farm in the beautiful green rolling hills of Gippsland, where the grass is plentiful and the dams are all full of water
• easily accessible in an industrial area of Konigsbach-stein, Germany
• on a dead-end road in "really middle of nowhere Kansas," with numerous cotton fields and giant bales of harvested cotton just off the "very boring" Kansas Turnpike
• on a walking trail along Soldier Creek in Poore Park, Oklahoma City ("Saw a turtle sunning itself on an old crag in the creek")
• in Podosowa, Poland, near fruit trees and vineyards and greenhouses
• in Postoliska, Poland, on property belonging to a large red-brick Catholic church with modern stained glass windows
• on the lakeshore in Stortorp, Sweden, lined with one- and two-story homes on good-size lots, all with fences or low, solid walls
• on the shore of Dodge Pond in rural Massachusetts, unfortunately out of reach behind a nice large old New England house painted bright yellow and an equally large barn, also yellow
• in the water, rolling in long waves from the storm off shore before breaking against the rocky shore near The Breakers, a famous mansion of the Vanderbuilt family located in Newport, Rhode Island
• in Virginia, on the grounds of Nansemond Suffolk Academy, past the baseball diamond, down a dirt path past the football practice field, near a single tree
• in Virginia, on the grounds of Fairfield Presbyterian Church, inside a fenced playground area past a school building
• in a farm paddock in rolling farm and forestry country near Lake Mahinerangi, inland from Dunedin, New Zealand
• in New South Wales, at the end of a dirt road, near a single-storey wood clad, white painted house tucked away behind some fruit trees
• in Victoria, Australia, deep in a thin, stringy eucalypt forest with scrubby dry undergrowth, surrounded by undulating hills and ravines dotted with old gold mines ("Close enough without disappearing down an old shaft.")
• on the Old Santa Cruz Highway, a two lane paved road that twists through the Santa Cruz mountains in California and is lined with old growth redwood trees that both look and smell fantastic
• in Maine, behind a garage with a big sign that said "Feeny Boat Shop", and a lobster boat in a dry dock between the garage and the house.
• and outside Abilene, Kansas, in Greenlawn Cemetery where are buried multiple generations of the direct ancestors of the player to reach this point ("So we sit here doing reports with setting sun and ghosts of my family, definitely a unique Geodashing experience.")