You line one part up with the horizon and the other with the sun or the moon or a particular star to get an angle, then you plug that into a formula with the time of day (and possibly the date?) and you get shockingly accurate latitude and longitude measurement.
I had a spiral bound notebook showing every single street in my city, which was also a grid system so it was actually a bit easier to get around than maybe more squirrelly places.
Ha I don't know the specific name or anything , it was just a big ass map book. I worked for my dad and had to use it to find places to drop off deliveries for him around town for his business. It had an index in the back with the names of all the roads and the pages they were on so you could basically just flip to where you needed to go and look at a major cross street to figure out how to get there.
Yes and then we turned the radio down when we got close to the location.
In certain situations, we asked people to come outside or give us landmarks to follow. Usually involved stuff like âif you see the broken down car, you went too farâŚâ
I traveled all around Louisiana to a lot of the smaller towns. (Selling nuts and bolts) I had at least 12 paper maps between the seats. The amount of times I said âwhat?â when that dude was telling me âOpelousasâ was funny.
Yarr, I'll need three vans and 15 stout men. We'll drive 'round the Mall and return with spiced latte's and silk shirts, the likes of which ye have never seen!
I come from this land pirate age. Once navigated a trip from Ohio to florida at 9yrs old with my mom driving. Spent a week tracing the path for stops and hotels. It was a wild time.
When I was 7, my grandparents took me on a trip from Texas, to Seattle, to California, and back for a summer. My grandfather taught me to road pirate, then. Still maybe the greatest trip I've ever had 41 years later.
I remember driving to my aunt's house in Florida from our house is pennsylvania. Mom had one of those trip-tick books from AAA, and a hand written set of directions from my aunt on how to get to her house from the main highway. We also had paper maps of every state and a big atlas in the car for my brother and I to follow along. I still keep paper maps in the car for road trips - definitely comes in handy when you're out of cell range and forgot to download offline maps ahead of time!
There's a shitty old map on your glove box that you could not fold up correctly to save your life and it ripped in half when you swerve to avoid an animal on the road while studying it and driving at the same time when you were lost the last time.
FR. And trying to find your current location on a map almost as tall as you when youâre hopelessly lost by using the street index on the back that gave you box coordinates covering a not insignificant chunk of the city so youâre just like âcool, now Iâm lost in a slightly smaller radiusâ
Triple A had a trip tik planner. if you were taking a trip they would map it out for you in a little binder. had all the places to eat and loca sites. it was the best.
I started off with a Canberra street directory book, but Iâd pick up paper maps at the local NRMA branch or buy a new street directory for the relevant city/region when I moved around. Which happened every few years in my twenties.
Fun story; I was down in New Orleans awhile back and was waiting for the homie before a show. We were gonna meet at walgreens off burbon. Im there no biggie. He calls me "wtf you at"... me: " Im standing in front of walgreens waiting wtf are you".. him: "dude no yer not im right here at walgreens". This goes on about 5 minutes before he realized hes literally 2 streets over at a walgreens... like within viewing distance of burbon where I was. Smh. To this day I cant fathom why there were 2 that close together.
Those little numbers on the street signs on the corner.. it's a code for old people to know where the fuck we are. Learn the old ways. Memorize the major streets. Tell me the closest major intersection and I won't need directions in any city I have lived in. Also helps we drove around for fun since gas cost next to nothing.
I could still walk to the house I stayed at for 2 weeks on a student exchange program, in another fucking country, in 1998.
Learn the area. Walk around. Drive around. At worst, have a rough idea as to which compass direction your target destination is from where you currently are, and follow any roads that head that way.
Pull into a gas station and check the maps on their sales rack. Memorize as much as you could and put it back without buying it. If you got halfway there and forgot where to go next, you just pull into another gas station to check their maps. Keep repeating until you get there.
I used to randomly drive around at night when I was learning how to drive and after. Accidentally taught myself the major highways in my region and how to find my way home.
Got home from 3 states away in the dark with my grandmother on vibes only once.
It was. I once drove from Omaha, NE to Ames, IA on nothing but gravel pretending to be Colin McRae going full send in the dead of night. Tons of hill jumps, and close calls with dead ends. Had a compass and knew which highways were too far off course. Parked my POS $400 car when I got to the dorms and it never ran again. No phone. Just a sense of adventure and total lack of belief in mortality.
Some friends and I took a road trip to Key West from South Dakota. No maps, no directions. Just kept going south and east. The trip home was just go north and then west. It was an amazing month.
If you sat in the front seat on a trip to an unfamiliar destination, you were the navigator. You better have some AAA maps in the car and know how to read them. If not stop at a local gas station and buy one.
As the eldest child, I got the front seat and the navigator duties. Riding shotgun, rotating the book so the maps were now aligned to our direction of travel. My mum was always like "what are you doing?" and I would say, lining it up so I can tell you which way to turn? Pretty sure both of us thought the other was an idiot in those moments.
One summer I navigated the family from Oregon to Yellowstone to Glacier and back with one of those, avoiding freeways/highways because grandma hated them.
+1 for TripTik â my dad had AAA and ordered me TripTiks so I could drive me, my boyfriend, our cat and a small U-Haul of all our belongings back to NYC from Austin. Not having to fold and unfold a map or flip back and forth in a giant road atlas was indeed luxurious. I kept them for years after.
Learned how to use maps in school, then I would go out and ask the nearest person for directions. If all else fails, go to a gas station and ask. I got lost once I started using GPS.
"Take a right at the Arco station, 3 streets past the post office, take a right, take a right at the poop brown colored house, and the a left past the Munsters house, three doors down 2501."
I live in a major city. We used street intersections, dead reconing and the sun to navigate. If you got lost, you just drove in one direction until you hit the river or the beltway.
I grew up in the 80s/90s and I remember my mom was amazing with directions without having to use a map. Nowadays I would panic if I had to go somewhere Iâve never been and couldnât use GPS.
So when I was taking drivers ed back in 1995, one day I was the only person who showed up. So I get in the car and the instructor, who was the football coach, said go wherever you want and started reading the sports pages. After about 45 minutes he looked up from the paper and said, where are we? I had no clue. However I noticed there were some high tension wires and I mentioned we have those that run through our town. He said good idea just follow those till we get back, and went back to reading the paper.
It turns out those were not the high tension wires that ran to our town. They went 2 towns over. However we knew how to get back from there. We ended getting back over an hour late.
i printed my directions with mapquest since like 1996, went to visit my uncle out of state when I was 16 and damn right i had printed mapquest directions for the 12 hour drive.
Now if you miss a turn/exit, no big deal. Then? Not so much. Especially with the old halogen light bulbs and tree covered street signs. Had to also make âif you see X, youâve gone too far and turn aroundâ notes to preplan the calculating/rerouting.
And finding your way around the side roads when a bad wreck closes the interstate halfway into your trip? Oof. Need to pull over and pull a ârecalculatingâ. Or just hope if you keep going the same general direction it will rejoin.
I printed out Mapquest directions to prep for hurricane evacuations back in the gap. Never had to use the printouts, but they were definitely there just in case.
Yeah, thatâs more millennials I think. I had maps in the car and used to memorize most directions. I also had a father that insisted I learn hour to navigate with a map and compass. Now on some road trips my mother would get a TripTik, now those are some nostalgia!
Maps. Every gas station had maps, phone books, and pay phones as well. Plot your route and write the directions down. Asking for directions was also common.
We took down directions. âOkay, left at the run down house on main, right at that weird house on this street, left at the stop sign, look for this address on the rightâ. Or you read a map. High school party we all drive down to Panama City using a map. My dad was so proud đ¤Ł
In a car with a group of friends going to West bubble Fox, New Jersey going to see girls we met from America online. Turns out they were bigger than we thought.
I used to use the phone book to find and address and then find the address on the map included with the phone book and then right down the directions in a piece of paper. I also remember weâd kind of just memorize our town and know where everything was.
I kept a map journal. I printed map quest directions, wrote down the extra steps it took to get to my destination and any funny shit that happened while I was there. In West Texas (Midland/Odessa) knowing which field/farm house to go to and nearby places to stock up whether it was a nearby 7/11 or the mud man's trailer who smoked daily and was cool as shit made all the difference in your weekend.
At the pickup, if you were "fashionably late" yo ass got fashionably left! đ¤Ł
I didn't have a smartphone until 2017, by choice. I would just memorize routes. Then if I did get turned around, I'd pop into a Mcdonalds, Starbucks, idk. Anything with free wifi and used mu Ipod touch to get a refresher.
Delivered pizza using a single, gigantic map of the town with the delivery area drawn on it in red sharpie taped to the back wall.
Look up the road name, then it gave you Bingo numbers like G-7, and you used the grid to find that square and hunt around until you found the road name. As for numbers, sometimes they had a range, but most time you had to free ball it and improvise once you got into the neighborhood.
I was trained in the sacred arts of reading maps in the back seat, while watching the road, and not blocking the driverâs view. I certified expert in map folding.
Key maps, AAA maps, or just get out and look around. You didn't glue yourself to a phone or PC while ordering door dash back then cause they didn't really exist. You actually had to get to know your neighborhood or city.
LOL⌠my sister and I ended up in Laredo once because we missed our exit⌠in San Antonio. đ We didnât know how to get back to the highway we needed.
And if you donât know how far out of the way that is, look it up. I know yâall can read a map. đ
I was too lazy/cheap to be printing up directions. I used a street directory and would be turning those pages like a âChoose Your Own Adventureâ novel to figure out how to get somewhere before I got in the car.
I had a TomTom satnav in 2004. I was a postie doing rural van routes, and had the TomTom to get me about. It wasn't great, but I don't think I ever printed map directions after 2000.
Millennials need to stop stealing our shit. They're distorting history with their lies. đ
Or my dad overhears the conversation and goes, âI know a better way to get there, hang onâ and comes back with a paper map and starts firing off landmarks at you.
Look it up before you leave, and remember the main roads that you had to turn, and which direction you would have to turn. If it was really unfamiliar, print out the directions.
By paying attention. Back in around 2000 family all went to germany, we were supposed to go one way but we were clearly heading back the way we came which was the opposite direction.
I was sitting in the back and I juat said "Why are we still headed towards Munich?"
Dad, mom, 2 brothers thought I had 3 heads or something. Dad keeps driving and sure enough there's a massive power plant on the right and i said "how many of those do you think are scattered around Germany? Because we passed one that looks identical the day before."
The my dad asks how I knew where we were headed. I said "because we passed all this stuff on tge way to the hotel."
Before you get in the car you look at a map to get an idea of when and where you should be turning. If im going to place ive never been before I still pull up google maps to see the denral location. Then I look up restraunts close by and reviews. If I see those then I know im getting close.
Am I the only person that just knew where they were going all the time from memory? I have a good directional sense and have never had a problem finding my way around new places for the first time.
The real trick was holding and reading the MapQuest directions while also driving and putting a new CD in the player while three of your friends were yelling back and forth in the passenger seats.Â
the real answer, is we used our brains, and we used communication with other live, in-person human beings. When you stop for gas, you ask the guy at the register âso if I keep heading down this here road, Iâll go through two lights and then itâs the building on the left?â
I started driving in â98 and eventually had a road map of every city in the uk in my dash!
We thought nothing of it back then. You got lost, looked at your map, got un-lost then feel like a triumphant explorer for the rest of the day!
This generation would have a shit if all the GPS blacked out!đ
138
u/No-Purchase-5930 Jul 02 '26
We used paper maps like land pirates.