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I still use a gazetteer to get around in New England. It's essentially a detailed widescreen view of the area around my route. I can see all alternate routes together, not just what GPS decides to show me.

Why would someone only use GPS? Makes no sense to me. Have you never taken a wrong turn and been amazed by seeing something new? I don’t have GPS, never will..

@mapquest.com , you have anything to add?

traveled to almost the entire continental us with one of these for work. for larger cities i sometimes had a more detailed local map. folded out like a giant parasail and never went back together in the right way.

On long trips, you could call AAA to have them plan your route, then send you a little book with all the directions, including a close up of each turn. Brilliant, clear, and never needed cell service or power. And they weren't selling your location data. Feels insane that we can't get back to that.

You'd cry & throw up to learn how London cabbies get licensed... www.bbc.com/news/article... & more nuanced personal details here: forum.artofmemory.com/t/london-tax... But in America & other nations, yes, paper maps - the things that inform the e-maps - were the opposite of insane

London black cab driver describes how he passed the KnowledgeBlack cab drivers need to pass the Knowledge but long does it take to memorise 320 routes?www.bbc.com

As kids, my brother and I spent hours looking at this - two pages per state, with lots of insets and data - population, climate, etc. To be the holder of the atlas on a road trip was a high honor!!!

Oh man, using a road atlas that lived permanently under the passenger seat was WILD. Squinting at those tiny squiggles looking for the right exit... Good times.

My little cousin doesn't even know the freeway numbers, nor does he know north from south. Little wonder how few actual skills people have now since they rely on their screens to do all their thinking for them.

Key maps were something else.

We got where we wanted to go. What would you do if your electronics quit working? I tried to use one of those programs snd it took me under an interstate bridge and claimed i was at my destination. Thank goodness i had a PAPER MAP AND KNEW HOW TO USE IT. IT!

Some times those strangers would get in the car with you to guide you properly.

Honestly I think that we don't ask random strangers for directions anymore is half of our nation's problem. Those random interactions lead to side conversations where we find common ground. Heck, anyone talking to something not their phone would be an improvement...

Picked this up and kept it in the seat pocket of the first car I ever bought. People in convenience stores and gas stations always knew the area. Women usually gave directions referenced by landmarks while men used distance.

I loved being the stranger asked to give directions. It was both civic duty and an awesome responsibility.

Got lost in village (don't ask). Not only did I have to ask for directions, I had to listen to her laugh while she explained they only had 4 streets.

I used to know the bus schedule for multiple lines.

Paper maps and dead reckoning. It worked more often than not!

Had to use one the other day. Lost my phone while wandering by rental bike in an unfamiliar city. Would not have made it back to the bike shop via the coastal, hilly and circuitous roads without that map! I got my phone back the next day thanks to an awesome person 😊 So dependent on phones 😬

“Take four lefts, then a right…”

Look at the map & you remember where to get & how to get there

It was fine, reading a map is just another skill that has died.

We actually used to shame men for their reluctance to stop driving to ask random gas station attendants

it's all true! I was one of the last but it's all true

The Thomas Guide was the ultimate source.

ever see a used Thomas' Guide to Lis Angeles?

I STILL use paper maps. Better than letting GPS steer me into the wilderness!

Even goes east/west and odd goes north/south. hth

You hadn't lived until you landed someplace you'd never been before at 10pm, and the hotel where the meeting was going to be was at the other end of town.

Thing about asking random strangers for directions is that they probably knew the directions! They got asked all the time, and anyway, how else would they get around? Also you got over the fear of getting lost a lot quicker.

My 24 year old coworker on vacation in Utah called myself (then 63) and my boss (60) bawling like a baby bc his GPS quit working in a broiling Utah desert but he didn't know how to read a paper map. We had to teach him how to use one over the office phone.

Want a real mind bender? We had to stay home to make calls because phone was attached by a cord to the wall! If we were out, and needed to call someone, we had to find a phone in a thing called a Phone Booth and then pay for the call BEFORE we dialed the number!

Lol. Pretty sure GPS saved my relationship.

Driving with? Dude, we were reading the map while driving.

It was would. Business trips were an adventure. The concierge could tell you how to get anywhere lol.

can you fathom this was also the age of "20 minutes or your pizza's free"

Also navigating Los Angeles with nothing but a Thomas Guide and a prayer

Mapquest was the greatest invention

I still have a huge road atlas in my car, in case I end up in the middle of nowhere with no internet connection also asking strangers for directions is a great way to experience new flavors of human you would otherwise never have encountered

We still do! There are large swathes of the West where the navigation systems are wholly unreliable, to say nothing of swathes where there's no cell service.

Paper maps are great. Never run out of juice, let you see the close up detail and the big picture at the same time (because they're three feet wide, unlike your phone), and the more you use them the more you learn your way around without them, unlike obeying a machine.

Imagine having an overhead view of your route, where you can recalculate directions and take spontaneous detours on a whim. Road trips were so much better

I remember just seeing a sign for a place and just going in that direction on vibes. Oh Philly is that way....ok lets go that way. We'll figure it out.

Sometimes you’d just stop at a gas station for directions. Wild!

Not only did we have paper maps but they were bound together in a big book called an atlas and on long road trips my dad would ask me how many miles until some highway junction so I did math too

lol when the idea of talking to a stranger terrifies an entire generation. one of the places you asked was at gas stations, they seemed to know their way around. you also looked at highway signs for guidance. is a phone/gps easier and more convenient. 100%. was the old way doable? very much so.

It was a great way to meet people.

You’d learn to imprint and search your memories for the logic of the city layout (or of the local geography in san diego’s case)

Did things like know and remember how to get around our own cities and didn't need a GPS to get across down.

It was fun. Where’s your sense of adventure? 😎

Looking at the paper map while moving is unsafe, so when going somewhere unfamiliar without someone to act as navigator you planned ahead. I'm not great at remembering long strings of directions so I'd write out the turn order. The road atlas was in the car in case I got lost and needed to reroute.

Young man, marriages sometimes hinged on how stubborn you were -- that you really "didn't" have to stop to ask for directions ... many close calls.

My father taught me how to use the interstate numbering system to navigate cross-country so you didn't need a map until you were close enough to ask directions at a gas station. (I'm in my mid-40s, so I know this is unusual. It's still useful, though.)

Genuinely think Mapquest was the perfection, and we went downhill from there. Paper maps were fun if you had time and didn't care, Mapquest was an improvement, and GPS made things weird.

Asking randoms for directions was so great. I am from California. I got lost in southern Appalachia near Gatlinburg and stopped at a gas station. A woman spoke to me in English for 10ish minutes and I had no idea what she said, nor did my buddy. We nodded said thanks and kept driving lost.

High school French saved my ass one time in a bar in rural France at night. I showed the gentleman the name of the B and B we couldn’t find and somewhere in the long answer I understood the words “right “ and “swimming pool”. (Didn’t know I even knew that word!) Found the B and B! Thanks bar guys.

There was a time when you could visit a new place and explore it by choosing to get lost. And that was a good thing. I have a box of maps from places I've lived and places I've visited, they are one of the great keepsakes, and they represent a chapter of my life that technology brought to an end.

My parents used narrow, stenopad-like AAA TripTiks Amateurs I could navigate using an atlas or those huge accordion-folded maps and... I could refold them

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAus...

National lampoons vacation, Clark asks for directions.flvYouTube video by paulkingmidaswww.youtube.com

Oh, and also stopping at a pay phone to find the local yellow pages in order to find a place to eat or hotel along the way.

Sit down, have a calming beverage, and I'll tell you about AAA and their TripTiks.

If you used a GPS to get there : - you have no context awareness, no sense of how the roads in that area fit together - you don't really know how to get there without GPS

Personally, I just drove in circles until I fell down crying. But I really made it work for me.

I still have a 1999 Thomas Guide in my car - when the zombie apocalypse happens and the satellites go dark - I’ll be ready!

Are you 12 years old?

Man, it's weird to see babies (complimentary) with PhDs. Don't mind me, I'm just gonna go sit in the rocking chair, pop a butterscotch candy in my mouth, and read the large-print version of Bluesky.

I remember one time I was map reading and told the girl I was dating at the time to turn left at the next road. "How can you tell?" "The map, dear." She was 25

So it was late at night, we're going around in circles trying to find this street, completely not able to find the street address. We stop at a gas station and I spot... a taxi driver! I nip over and BEG him for help. My friend freaks out at "you have a strange man with you!" There is a St & a Ln.

Drove through London in the ‘80s, with the map book (aka the iconic A to Z) in front of me. So many near misses and almost fatalities.

We memorized phone numbers. It was truly the dark ages.

Still recall: met up with a dozen college friends at a loft in Greenwich Village about 45 years ago. I came from Philly. 1/2 of us had never been to NYC before, we had no cell phones, host had no PHONE. All got there around 8 PM. Had a great time. Drove home the next day. Paper maps FTW.

Once my house mate was asked directions to the yacht harbor in Seattle and the route was so complicated the lady invited him to the party so he jumped in. And ended up at a 2 day blowout party on Steve Miller's 65 foot sailboat. So....

you also just got to be more okay with not taking the “optimal” route every time. sometimes you just sort of approximated the direction until you were there.

Also, asking strangers was brilliant. They would end up recommending places to go or things to see you had never heard of. Never get that via GPS

When I was 19, I drove from San Antonio to Virginia Beach with an Atlas of the US bought from Walmart and MapQuest directions printed from the library... Atlanta was the worst

You really got to know a place by looking over maps and road atlases. You can mimic that with Google Maps, but it isn't the same as having that tactile feel.

Women asked random strangers for directions. Men, not so much. They preferred to wander, trying their best not to look lost, in hopes they would stumble onto their destination and never have to admit it. Gas was a lot cheaper. 🤷‍♀️

A cool thing you could do when you were lost, driving in a big city like London was: park up, run into a newsagent and quickly look up where you were in an AtoZ, memorize where to go, put it back and then run out and drive away. Extra kudos if you could do it all without getting a parking ticket

Until they invent a phone screen that folds out to A2, I'm keeping my AA map in the car. I don't like having to choose between resolution and scope when checking my journey, and Garmin is 💩 when it comes to the coastal roads of Devon, Cornwall, The Valleys and Pembrokeshire.

My dad was USAF. When we moved somewhere new, I studied a local map to lnow where we were and how to get around. Did that before I started at Louisville my freshman year; had no issues navigating a city I wasn’t entirely familiar with.

Paper maps show you where you're going AND all the other places you could go AND help you memorize the way back. I've had some of my best conversations with strangers while giving or getting directions. You get great food recommendations, safety advice -- it's great!

And many times we had to use a pay phone during the trip

And the cars were unreliable as shit, too! As a kid in the 80s/90s I had multiple family vacations ruined by car trouble.

For a long time it was foldable maps Then spiral binder maps You’d ask for directions and no man in history ever said “I don’t know” Somebody invented Mapquest and you’d print out your directions Then came Tom Tom GPS Nowadays there’s a small device built for distraction with GPS included

MapQuest had a ten year run before it all moved to devices where we would print out 3 or 4 pages of directions.

If you wanted to go somewhere you'd call them and ask where it was, no lie. Like "ok and what are the nearest cross streets" and then if you still didn't get it you'd have to bust out the Thomas guide

It was fun, added to the adventure on a daily basis

Actually had to stop and buy a paper map enroute to Bryce Canyon NP when the route died on my rental car nav, no GPS coverage. Gas station had a whole rack of maps, knew the tourists would be coming in! 😁

(I'm old) My folks had two rules before a kid was allowed to sit in the front seat: You had to be tall enough that your feet hit the floor, and you had to be able to read the (paper) map AND (possibly most important) be able to fold it up correctly.

We used to drive across the country with an atlas. I still have one in my car that's definitely out of date at this point. I have definitely converted to using Google maps, but I still review the route before I leave. It gives me anxiety to rely on the computer. I'm 46.

The current trajectory suggests it's worth possessing hard-copies

The worst part was the direction that they gave. "Go down this road a bit. Then make a right. I think it's the third or fourth right. I forget the name of the road. Anyway, stay on that a bit until you're just past where the Hardee's used to be..."

So grateful to belong to one of the last generations that didn’t rely on screens to walk them through every goddamn thing.

One time I was learning to drive, and my dad took me on a long road trip. He told me to stay on the highway, and then he took like a two hour nap. Woke up and we were way off course.

Lolol 😂

Using your brain like that is wiiiild

These were the high tech tools I used to backpack through Europe between college and law school.

I drove from Maine to Nevada and back, different routes each time, some partly in Canada, with a road atlas (in 1994, no cell phone, either.) It was easy!

When we got some gps you’d print your directions from the computer and take it with you and invariably the pages would get mixed up while you drove and you got lost. Wild times.

www.youtube.com/shorts/FVoDC...

"National Lampoon's Vacation: The Most Hilarious and Memorable Scene of Clark's Ghetto Directions!"YouTube video by AFM Movieswww.youtube.com

Always had highlighters and different color pens in our cars to mark different route on the maps.

Everyone says they were fine, but I once had to call my brother to give me directions while I was driving around Greenpoint/ Williamsburg having accidentally taken the Manhattan Bridge away from my night classes at Pace into another borough so thank God for GPS

Yeah. We thought it was brilliant when MapQuest came around and you could print directions. Before that, if we knew the people we were going to see, we'd ask them for directions and/or use a map. If we got lost, we'd ask a store clerk or gas station attendant. It wasn't that long ago, either.

I prefer Apple Maps now, but back in the day I would try to write down every major turn so I could quickly see which exit was next. Then came AAA “Triptiks”. Basically, it was a custom spiral bound flip book map of your trip, and they would highlight areas with construction slowdowns to avoid. 🗺️🧭

"So what you're going to do is drive down this road another couple miles, make a right at the windmill, a left three blocks after that, and there's a gas station there where you can ask for directions."

Yeah I mean it was kind of nice actually. Like a puzzle to figure out. Plus asking directions gave you an excuse to talk to people, which is something all the tech is getting rid of.

My first job out of tech school was as a field engineer covering about one and a half states. I had a brick cell phone and paper maps.

Wait'll you hear about a triptik

Regardless of practicality, maps are beautiful objects.

Paper maps have never once sent my location to the government

Gas stations were a great place to ask for directions. Either from the employees or from other customers with local license plates.

Doc, I used to keep myself entertained for *hours* looking at the atlas on road trips.

It sucked and I can't believe people miss it

Its very funny that all these people are pretending like it didn't suck but it did. It was way harder to get places and much more stressful, they're just taking big ole hits of nostalgia.

People in Boston still navigate by Dunkin locations. IRL navigation survives in pockets.

“Well, if that’s where you are going I wouldn’t start from here…”

If the Guide wasn’t guiding, we could reliably pull into the gas station and get directions from the friendly attendant. Then you put a dime in the phone and tell your friends you’re on the way.

It was in no way insane and we are worse off for the lack of cognitive effort and forced requests for assistance from strangers. www.scientificamerican.com/article/lond...

Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's StreetsMemorizing 25,000 city streets balloons the hippocampus, but cabbies may pay a hidden fare in cognitive skillswww.scientificamerican.com

Sometimes you just didn't go somewhere if you didn't kno how to get there. Also see food and cooking. If it wasn't in your family recipes or cook books, you didn't make it.

You'd ask for directions, and the random stranger would answer you! Without shooting you first, even.

Yup! My Xennial ass had the Thomas Guide. If that failed, gas station clerks had my back.

"strangers" plural is correct, you learned to ask at least 3 of 'em to get a general consensus on which way "thataway" really was.

Is this a confession that you can’t get anywhere using a paper map? you might want to rectify that (if true)

i think "maps that show where you are" is under-appreciated as the revolution it was

we had a really good sense of direction and geography (still do) and we pulled over to look at the maps

I still use breadcrumbs. Only been kidnapped by a witch in a candy house once.

Getting lost while driving with a map was how I got to know the young woman who became my girlfriend and is my wife…

People always asked me for directions because I was a human GPS back in the day! I would write down directions and follow them, so I knew how to navigate for my family. If there was road construction sometimes you had to look at the map and figure out a new route on the fly.

Paper maps have several advantages over electronic ones. But you can’t carry a bunch of them inside your phone.

GPS really is one of the better inventions of the smartphone age

There is something positive to be said about paying attention for your next turn when you have the major steps memorized. It made you a more attentive driver. There was no recalculation until you could stop and recalculate yourself.

Thomas Guide maps. Can find anything from cross streets to section corner monuments.

I think we still have somewhere a bundle of atlases that my wife owned that we'd take with us on car trips. Every time we went somewhere new, she'd buy a new set of maps from AAA that we'd use to plan the trip. I do not miss those days.

Triple-A used to make us a special booklet with the route. And we arrived at our destination. It was fine.

We were delivering pizzas in 30 minutes with paper maps & compasses. 😂

There's a new PA paper map in my glove box right now. What if my phone dies, or is stolen, or I'm lost with no service? Always have a backup. Also there's a satisfaction in holding it in your hands, like with an actual book. Not everything needs to be on a screen.

Paper maps are FAR from obsolete. If you serve in the ground armed forces, you receive training on map reading and land navigation without a GPS - as it should be. www.azquotes.com/quote/347078

Robert A. Heinlein QuoteA human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take or...www.azquotes.com

Yeah, how did we survive without the internet? 🙄

And the pizza still managed to get delivered.

Thomas Bros, yoo.

Visualizing and planning routes is apparently good for your brain compared to robotically relying on a voice giving turn by turn directions. Just heard about a study on this. And interacting with other people didn’t feel half as unsafe as it does now.

Paper maps were great and all, but in reality i just ended getting lost and wasting a significant number of hours in my life. Like maybe a year in total hours for me, someone with a terrible sense if direction.

“Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here…..”

it's exercise. it's good for you www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harv...

Why Taxi Drivers Don’t Die of Alzheimer’s | Harvard MagazineExplaining taxi and ambulance drivers’ protection against Alzheimer’s disease.www.harvardmagazine.com

GPS is great for point to point, but worthless for giving you a sense of where anything is in relation to anything else.

it was actually perfectly fine

I moved to Brooklyn in 1987, and had a spiral bound BOOK of maps of every part of every single borough. And the maps weren't connected to each other either! Like you had to go from page AE1 to page PG13, to find a street or avenue continuation. God, I loved that book. It was a true work of art.

Still got it, baby.

A novelty.

Nothing beats the self-satisfied pleasure of the dude who, asked for directions, can confidently rattle off nuances that you will never see in even the best GPS apps "Now at the Sack of Suds you're gonna want to go straight. Don't do it! Take the two-track dirt road just to the right of it."

Dad made sure to teach us how to use a map, and those lessons got used for every road trip we/I had ever gone on.

Me and my bandmates and Rand McNally

at times it was pretty awkward too

Turns out using your brain for things makes you good at them. Oh look: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation - Scientific ReportsScientific Reports - Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigationwww.nature.com

I miss "trip-tix" from AAA.

/me Chortles in Gen X

Maps, real paper ones, are still some of the finest UIs ever devised. We spent 1600 years refining those things, we got real good at it.

"Were" incorrectly implies past tense.

Ole Randy the atlas is highlightered up good, many moves and many Dead runs and other mischief. Maps are a joy

We are very brave and intelligent.

In the Nineties, I drove all the way from Ostend in Belgium to Wrocław in Poland using just a book of European road maps. Belgium was the most confusing part as the map was in French while the road signs were in Flemish

I remember road trips with my parents and we had triptik paper maps from CAA/AAA. You can still get them actually, but now you do it yourself through their webpage if you're a member.

I once stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Indiana, apologized for the interruption, and asked the diners for detour tips. A full-restaurant conversation ensued. I bought some chicken--seemed polite--and found the right road thanks to my new friends.

Dahmani, L., Bohbot, V.D. Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation. Sci Rep 10, 6310 (2020). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation - Scientific ReportsScientific Reports - Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigationdoi.org

never! (ask directions). if you drive long enough the universe will provide. lol

I still carry paper maps in my van. I've seen GPS flip out.

a strong sense of direction is our superpower, good luck buddy

The key was to plan your route out in advance and memorize it, so you only had to check the map if you were confused. It really didn't get that confusing until you got into an unfamiliar city. Going city to city was easy enough.

Seems kind of wimpy that someone can’t fathom a map. Perhaps an orientation course? One can’t forget how to think.

And it worked.

My dad kept old maps in his car that did not show INTERSTATE HIGHWAYS IN NEW ENGLAND plus I always needed local knowledge, so "what route should I take on a Tuesday at 11 am?" and take notes. We got maps at gas stations.

Yep, & a guy in Maine told me, seriously, that “ you can’t get there from here”…

Was good for social cohesion at least

I used to love -- LOVE -- the Rand McNally road atlas. I didn't have to be going anywhere, I'd just read it. It had all the provinces and states and ... Mexico! And little city insets where you could find landmarks you'd only heard about. For a kid who just got his license, it opened up the world.

You had to know how to get where you were going before you even left the house!

It’s our cross to bear.We were made stronger, had more patient and developed better social skills. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I have a Rand MacNally road atlas from 1999 that I still look at. The detail is incredible. It’s fun to use!

I once asked a young man in Echo Park for directions. He was colorful but friendly and helpful.

When I was 14, I traveled with my mother, younger brother and sister (ages 8 and 4) from Central America to New York in a Ford Anglia, which was a 4 cylinder stick. My mother, who drove, made me the navigator and I learned how to read a map the hard way, navigating mountains and hairpin turns.

It's me, staying up the night before a road trip to use the tiny black arrows indicating distance between cities so as to plan out gas station stops and the like.

They’re called bonding experiences.

The free maps from AAA until I got my hands to a Thomas Guide. Gas station attendants were also helpful.

God forbid a component of our day involve face-to-face human interaction. The risk! The exposure!

youtu.be/C0pRYZLTC5k?...

Thomas Guide: L.A.’s Indispensable Map!YouTube video by L.A. in a Minuteyoutu.be

Triple A trip-tiks any one? Anyone?

I loved, loved, loved being the navigator when we drove. There’s just something satisfying about finding your way on a map! And if you’re good at that, no need to ask for directions. Hey, did I just stumble across my post-apocalyptic skill!?

If I were going somewhere in town that I wasn’t familiar with, I would look at the map in the phone book and memorize the route before I left the house.

The best part was when there was a wreck on the interstate only a few cars rolled the dice trying to find a workaround. Now Google and Apple create secondary and tertiary traffic jams in rural bfe America at the slightest interstate slowdown.

Thomas Maps!

learn to talk to people

Absolutely. I knew i needed bifocals when i couldn’t read the tiny print on the map.

You'd plan shit out ahead of time. If you needed, you'd write down a list of turns and street/highway names on a post-it and stick it to the dash. If you got lost, you pull over and go over the paper map to figure out where you were, and make a new plan. The manual version of "recalculating..."

We also had to remember all of our friends and families phone numbers by heart It only seems insane in retrospect because we’ve been offloading our cognitions to our phones for 20 years

In the premiere episode of the BYU-TV show Relative Race (a lower-budget knockoff of The Amazing Race, with genealogy), they started out in San Francisco. For their first challenge, they sent the teams off without their cellphones and with paper maps to navigate the MacArthur Maze. 🤣🤣🤣

Even worse, anytime you asked someone, anywhere, for directions, your desired location was always, "about a half-mile down the road." It could have actually been 5 miles, or 500 yards away, but you were always told it was "half-a-mile" away.

I used to deliver* pizzas back when I was in college They’d send me out with 4-5 orders at a time and I’d get one glance at the big map on the wall to plan out my route on the way out the door… all in my head! These kids today… *dont get me started on the Enshittification of pizza delivery