The No-GPS Road Trip (popularmechanics.com)

Ezra Dyer, a reporter at Popular Mechanics, decided to ditch the GPS system he has on his car and the mapping service on his phone to see how hard it could be to go to North Carolina from his home, Louisville, Kentucky. He shares his experience: I begin downtown, by the river. It seems that if I get on 32 East, I can find Route 150 toward Tennessee. It takes about one block for my plan to fall apart. The street I'm on dead-ends and forces me onto a seemingly parallel road that soon wanders off at an angle. I discover that there's the fancy, Kentucky Derby side of Louisville, but also the Thorobred Lounge gentleman's club side. Somehow, I blunder onto Interstate 264, a ring road, where the exit numbers indicate that I'm at least ten miles from where I thought I was. And yet, it works out. See, this is the way you used to do it. You keep driving. I exit for Route 32 and settle in for a long drive east. I aim to make it to Knoxville by dinner without having any real idea of whether that's possible. It doesn't help that my atlas crams all of Kentucky onto two pages, printed with fonts evidently developed by those calligraphers who can write the Magna Carta on a piece of capellini. So I stop at a gas station to buy a local map. There are none to be found, so I pull into the next gas station. Then a third. In my mind's eye, there are metal racks at every gas station, over near the door, stocked with maps. Well, those don't exist anymore. I don't know when they disappeared, but they're gone. "Try Walmart," says one cashier, as if I could find it. About an hour in, I'm in traffic-clogged strip-mall hell, stoplights to the horizon. The upside is that I have no concept of time. Instead of compulsively checking a screen to anguish over my plight, I drive. I'm curiously peaceful. I can't do anything about the traffic, so I exist in it, placid. And eventually it gives way, the stoplights dissipating into lush Kentucky countryside. The Defender is happy to amble along at 55 mph, so amble I do, down to Route 150 toward the Tennessee border. Read the full story here.

Comments

TripTik

[Dan East]

Back in the 80s my family moved over a thousand miles away for dad to go to school. We were AAA members, and my parents visited the local AAA and got a TripTik. It seems they still have them (at least in name - seems to be an app or something now), but back then it was a linear map that was bound at the top. You would flip through the pages and the roadway you were to take was always oriented up / down along the paper. They would custom build it for you, inserting the appropriate sheets into the booklet, to get you to your destination. Then of course you could follow it backwards for the return trip. I remember they even manually highlighted the route, and would mark areas of construction on the map. They would also show points of interest and good places to stop.

Here are some pictures (random sources off the internet that match what I remember):
https://img0.etsystatic.com/00...

Fold out detail:
https://yearofadventure.files....

Here's one that's been stamped marking an area where delays might occur:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-2gf...

Re:Uh....

[Oswald McWeany]

That's basically how I still do all my road trips. Get out the paper maps!

I almost never use GPS on my phone because I have very little data plan. (actually I have a decent data plan, but I share it with my wife, and she uses 90% of it up in the first week of every month).

It's nice to get out of a bind, but if I'm planning a trip, I do it the same way I always have. I look at a map (nowadays on a computer) before I leave. Memorise my route- and leave.

If I have to make more than a dozen turns on unfamiliar roads, I'll print off, or hand write the directions down. You'll be surprised how you learn routes better when you're not relying on GPS. Next time you make the trip you have it committed in memory instead of having to look it up again.