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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.
That's basically how I still do all my road trips. Get out the paper maps!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No GPS, only maps? Are you insane? THAT'S A SUICIDE MISSION!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Check out the other articles in this series:
"Going to a Restaurant Without Consulting Yelp: Can It Be Done?"
and
"Watching a TV Show without an Aggregate Review Score: One Man's Odyssey"
True think-pieces for our age
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...
Better known as 318230.
So you do the same thing you should be doing with your phone: you pull over, put the car in park, and pour over the maps until you figure it out.
If you think it's tough in a car, try doing it in a plane sometime. In that case pulling over is not such a trivial task.
Meh, "North" is only important if you are using the technology that the GPS displaced - the compass.
Look everyone, millennials thinks GPS replaces compasses.
if only there were a way to tell which direction was north without some sort of device....
"His name was James Damore."
...did a road trip become rocket science that requires a computer?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...for decades. I'm 70. It works, but it sucks. Basically you have to read the make, MEMORIZE your turns, and then go. On interstates, that'll take you a long ways, but in town? Forget it, you're going to have to stop after a while and memorize the next set of turns if it goes on too long. Then of course there's the question of whether this is the right turn or is it the interesection that is 200 feet up the road. Signs? Signs? We don't need no steekin' signs.... yes we do, but if they're the size of a postage stamp, it matters with a map, not so much with a GPS. And then there's the signs that are big enough, but have 6 trees growing up around them and are covered with a poison ivy plant yet to boot.
Driving has always been an adventure, but we don't have to get silly about it. Use the GPS...
Not that long ago (a bit more than a decade or so) Cars didn't have GPS. Long before we had them at all, I used to drive regularly from Detroit to DC and Texas. I could even make it back from those destinations! :O
When I moved from Detroit to CA, I planned my route with maps and drove based on my instructions with maps as a backup. I can tell East from West by looking at the Sun, so I can tell if I'm going the right direction. All of this stuff used to be 2nd nature to people. Now I have to read about some person's heroic effort to travel about 500 miles? Really?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Ever been halfway to your destination when "Satellite signal lost" is heard over the speaker? Then you miss an important exit in the time it takes the GPS to regain signal and re-calculate? This happened several times for me, along with the realization that I was becoming more and more directionally challenged by relying 100% on GPS. I still use GPS to this day. But you know what? Usually before you click the 'guide me with your sweet voice, robot lady' button, the GPS app (google maps for me) plots out a course on a map for you that is zoomable and superior to any written map. I take a few minutes to analyze the route, using my brain to plot out the course and making notes of possible alternative routes. This way you have the course in your head, you can still get there if the GPS signal is lost or the app crashes, you are still exercising the part of your brain that modern humans should keep, and you can rely on the GPS lady until things go awry.
I recommend all humans do this, you never know when you will be without a GPS device in your hometown (or even farther!) trying to get home. Its a basic survival technique, and I have learned over the years not to let basic survival techniques be lost to technological dependence. (e.g. know how to use CPR, and don't expect to be able to look up on youtube 'how to perform CPR' in an emergency)
Also: If you live in America and you are going from one state to another, you don't really need GPS, or a map to get there. The roads are numbered according to orientation, the signs are aplenty leading you to the next major destination. If you are in New Mexico and want to go to Denver, just follow signs for 'Pueblo' then follow signs for 'Denver'. Its probably the most user-friendly road navigation system ever created.