Uhhh… custom turn-by-turn from mapquest is a pretty recent thing. I used to use an atlas supplemented by more foldy-uppy paper maps and even occasionally stopping to ask for directions.
Were you ever good enough to be able to fold the map back up properly?
Kids will never experience being stared at by people sitting on their porches while slow-driving through a seedy neighborhood because you read the map upside down.
Mate we used to navigate from large physical atlases. I remember having to pull out the state atlas and find page for the county we were in and then route a path and navigate my mom to our destination when I when I was like 12.
It wasn’t better but I kinda miss it.
We drive across the country every summer to visit family. Growing up, my parents used to talk about different routes and which one felt faster. Like “you can get off the interstate and take this county road and shave some time off.” But then they’d argue about if it was worth taking a road with a lower speed limit even if it was less distance.
Eventually they tried to impart that wisdom to me and would ask “so which route are you taking?” It took years for them to finally grasp that I just go whatever the way the GPS tells me is faster.
Japan doesn’t have street names except for a very very few, so in the past when someone would give you directions, they would make you a map and add details for where to turn (e.g. house with blue roof and a dog).
Houses do have numbers though and there’s a code used by mailmen, so that also helps.
And it doesn’t help when everything is named “chome”
If the trip was short, and roads in a grid (Midwest, not California), one could just memorize the major turns and wing it.
This is how some went hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. (Gotta cross check with city names.)
I enjoyed looking at the big map of my state and calculating the approximate time we would either pass a city, or arrive at our destination. It was fun. I was pretty close too!
I used to do something similar on my trips back from college, calculate my ETA based on the mile markers and my speed. I was damn near dead on, too!
Hell yeah! I still do that on road trips to pass the time. Keeps things a bit interesting.
Here’s another one, I didn’t have a watch and only had a flip phone back in college, too. I got pretty good at estimating the time based on shadows thrown by poles or trees and north. I joked (and won one bet, at least) that I could tell the time to within a 10 minutes increments. I mean, that’s not super challenging, now that I think about it again, due to the hourly schedule you’re already on at college. But, hey, it’s one of those goofy and ridiculous things you joke with your friends about.
That’s pretty cool. Reminds me of a Seinfeld episode.
My parents used one of these to plan the vacations:
That’s really cool!
I have one of those. They’re useful for measuring distances on topo maps where pretty much nothing is a straight line.
Yes, i used one for planning hikes.
I drove 1500 miles with directions to the town center, and a phone number written on a paper plate. I then used a pay phone to call her and tell her “Surprise, I drove to your town, wheres your apartment?”
She bet me I wouldn’t.
I won that bet. Victory party lasted the entire weekend, then I drove home. 😂
Ahh, 1998. May it never return.
Lol. True. I’m ild enough to remember my mother riding shotgun and navigating with that big-ass printed map while dad just followed orders.
How did they even reach places back then…I wouldn’t find my way outta the garage without android auto and Sygic.
That was a major strain on a few relationships, some people are just terrible at directions.
True true…but still, I’m older than the internet but how people made it from A to B back in the days eluded and still eludes me. And they even managed to be on time. I wouldn’t have made it into the right country…
I had my dad once draw a map from memory and I had to read that so my mum and I could go visit a relative in hospital. Those were the days.
I miss that. I remember it was normal seeing people on the side of the road, checking the map before continuing their trip.
My buddy installed alarm systems. He had the Thomas Guide, or whatever the book of maps was, and learned to navigate like a badass. I’ve always got lost and smartphones changed my world.
I have a thing called left-right confusion and before mapquest I was hurtin’! I would go in a gas station and get directions but never had a pen to write them down and then the odds of me mentally flipping a turn at some point were like 200%
mapquest was a boon but I truly love just letting siri tell me which way to go. This rarely backfires.
I miss these simpler times.
It’s still more fun. I like using the offline maps mode on Google Maps and having to plan my routes.
