People who remember life before GPS…

,..speaking strictly for myself, I think always having GPS on in a car reduces these benefits. For example pre-GPS, I thought I had a very good innate sense of direction. But now I feel my that sense of direction eroding if I'm always glancing at a map in the car to see where I am and where I'm going.

YMMV!

Full service gas stations always sold maps and the attendants were expected to know how to give you directions to nearby roads or local addresses.

Today, if go into a convenience store and ask how to get to the local Walmart, chances are the clerk will just give you a blank stare.

I remember many times being at a stop light and the car next to you asking you to roll down your window and then asking you if you know where "blah blah blah" is and if so asking you for directions to "blah blah blah".

Yup, remember the days of the AAA triptiks and paper maps/atlases.

I am thinking about taking a trip out west later on this year, so I dropped in at my local AAA office and picked up maps of the states that I will be traveling through. If you buy these things, they are now $8.95 (I believe), each. Trip-tiks are still available but they are digital. You enter a destination and then you print out the trip-tik. Interesting how things have changed over the years. Fortunately, I still have a fairly decent sense of direction. I only use a GPS when I’m going to a strange address or in the case of going to my sister-in-laws in Roanoke. I don’t use the GPS for directions (since I’ve been driving down there a couple of times a year for the last 50 years), but mainly to determine the arrival time.

My recollection is that they were free.

One good thing about GPS is, my wife no longer nags me to stop and ask for directions.

Yes I remember that Shell gas stations had free maps with the Shell Logo on them.

next milestone will be autonomous driving

I think it was just last year I finally got rid of the paper maps from my vehicle.

In my case, it as quite a few CAA paper maps.

Yes. My family made two 3-week western trips from Ohio in the late 1950s. With three sons collecting maps, we had a rule that only one of us could pick up one map at each station. Still got quite a few.

When I attended college in the mid 1960's, the walls in my dorm room were just plain cinder block. I drove through 5 states to get home for Thanksgiving and began collecting paper road maps to use as wallpaper.

The maps were free back then and gas stations often had maps of adjacent states. I had most of the northeastern US on the walls by the end of my freshman year.

After college, I began a collection, hoping to get all 50 states. I had maps of 44 states by the time gas stations began charging for them.

Family always seem stunned, that I know where everything is, in places we have never been,
I don't
I just know where I was, where I am now, and where the target is, and can imagine the shortest path between them
was a bush-baby
800km to town, flat desert that looks the same in every direction
survival meant learning to navigate

family are townies, small-townies, but townies

On long haul trips, my wife would navigate.

1. She had trouble when we were going South, but the map was held with north at the top. Couldn't translate the reverse.
2. She usually figured out where to turn, just after we past the point.

Now I don't have that problem.

I remember taking aerial photos of home, to add them as backgrounds to the first gps-s,
because there were no roads for miles,
and a person could add features to old gps, that cannot be done with new "better" ones

"home" is 80 x 125 km
everybody has aircraft, it's bush
the highway got paved in 2017
there are cattle stations bigger than countries,

Oh those wonderful long trips with a paper map tucked inside your motorcycle jacket, which turned into papier mache if you got caught in a rain storm.

My first GPS Navigation setup back in 1997 was a lashed up combo of a Garmin GPS 12 hooked up to a Psion 3a pda with a null modem cable. Must have had about 15' of cable all wrapped up in a plastic bag and the pda in a clear plastic bag all on top of my bike tank bag.

I've always loved maps and even as a kid I had maps all over my walls instead of posters and GPS just caught my attention.

When I was young my wife and I took a trip to Texas to visit my brother and his wife. We arrived in Fort Worth fairly late at night and asked for directions at a gas station. The guy had a big map on the wall and proceeded to give us detailed instructions. We thanked him and returned to the car. Once in the car I looked at my wife and asked, "Did you understand anything he said? My wife said she didn't understand him either but the map had clued her in and she knew where to go.

My wife was trained as a cartographer, by the government, in the late 1960s, and was our "expert" map reader and navigator.

In 2004, we bought our first RV motorhome and soon after I bought a Garmin GPS. She really resented it at first, but after we got snarled in city traffic a few times and really needed advance lane information, she began to see the need for it.

Soo... Now she still overrules it, on occasion, she is glad to relax more and enjoy the scenery rather than studying the map.

Life is good !!!!!

I recall in the early 70's my grandmother using those. Now when I look at 3D Track Up it always reminds me of that. Makes me dizzy though. I'm old fashioned and like the North Up 2D maps like when holding the old Rand McNally Road Atlas.

I was a big user of the Thomas Guide (Thomas Bros. Maps) here in the Los Angeles/Orange County CA area. They were a huge help and necessity and I wouldn't be without one.

My dad pretty much never used a map (that I recall) and we used to take road trips very frequently; to the local mountains as well as take our boat out to the ocean...mainly Long Beach, CA. I really don't know (or begin to remember) how he was able to navigate to all these areas.I don't ever remember him getting us lost. In the boat though, he did have and use the boat's compass and I remember him using visual landmarks on the coast to tell where he was.

I remember the state road map. Had one for every vehicle glove compartment. Always had a hard time refolding them. I think in the early 2000's TomTom and Garmin GPS units for cars became popular.

This thread brings back many fond memories.

My father was a yachtsman who prided himself on his navigational skills using a compass and USCGS paper charts. I spent a good deal of my youth aboard his boat and continued to cruise with him well into adulthood.

When I became interested in GPS, I used my first receiver, a Garmin GPS III, to feed raw data into software on a laptop. This was before nautical chart plotters and digital charts were available, so I scanned paper USCGS charts into digital format.

I thought my father would approve of my hobby and took the rig along when cruising with him. He didn't think much of the newfangled gizmo and it became a competition between his navigational skills and GPS.
Much to his annoyance, GPS proved to be more accurate.

I gave him a GPS V for Christmas the following year and he eventually began using it. He didn't give in completely though and at age 80, took a course in celestial navigation using a sextant. He was about to buy one of the new Garmin chartplotters that had just hit the market but unfortunately, he became ill and had to sell the yacht.

I still have that old Garmin GPS III and it brings back pleasant memories every time I see it.

I lived off of map books all the time. I've been a truck driver most of my working life, dump truck, trash truck, delivery truck etc. and having maps was crucial to getting from stop to stop until I learned a route. Great for finding new stops or detours around problems with traffic. I had a backpack filled with "Franklin" map books of the counties I would be in. They were really detailed and had every street listed, unlike a full state map where you just get the major roads.

I think because I was really good at reading maps I had a better sense of direction since I had to pay attention to my surroundings.

I became kind of a map geek back then, still am to a degree. Thanks to Google maps I've been all over the world, and never left my home. Found a lot of interesting places too. Like Derby Line VT where there's a library that's in the USA and Canada with a line on the floor where the border is. Another is Point Roberts WA. Totally separated from the rest of the USA except by water. To get there by land you have to travel through Canada.

An example of the maps that helped my career can been seen here:

https://i.postimg.cc/rwgSDn5n/mapbook.webp

To get to a particular destination this morning while traveling north I had to perform the following

* exit the highway using the west bound clover leaf exit
* Use the S bound clover leaf entrance then exit left (west) rather than do the full cloverleaf to get back on.

* Go through 2 stops signs, the first of which was part of the off ramp for south bound traffic for the above highway

*2nd stop was at the actual street I needed to get to.

All very confusing without seeing it on a map. I did a google street view before heading out there.

https://i.imgur.com/aXD0E7o.png

I didn't actually need a gps for this, but the street view made it much clearer with all those one way streets present.

Perhaps the title should be life before streetview.....

When I'm going to an unfamiliar destination I try to make it a habit to use Google Streetview so the configuration of things at the end is not a surprise to me when I get there. Maps are good, but the actual look of the thing adds another dimension.

I miss the gas stations attendants cleaning my windshield, checking my oil and filling my tank. Was that this century?

Those paper maps I got from a gasoline station still can't fold them back.

I hate to admit this, but I'm not as mentally sharp as I was in my younger years. I've come to rely on the GPS, even for routes I know by heart, to remind me of upcoming turns.

Talking on the phone (hands free) or conversing with a passenger while driving is distracting enough where I can easily miss my exit.

Not sure what I would do if I were still in the age of paper maps.

I think my sense of direction is not as good as it was before GPS. I do remember the Triptiks from AAA. I loved those, expecially the intersting things to see on the back of each page.

I still like the GPS as I am never afraid of getting lost so I am more adventurous in exploring new routes.

Last one!

My wife would navigate with the maps telling me where to turn left or right. The maps are ok in the daytime, but very hard to read at night. Sometimes my wife complains that she really doesn't know where she is, because the gps calculates all of the routes.

I love GPS and use it extensively. However, relying on GPS but having no sense of direction has gotten quite a few people in trouble, both driving and flying.

Growing up in western Ohio, with roads on a simple grid, and towns mostly at the interval in which the territory was originally drawn up I thought I had a good sense of direction.

But it seems I mostly could just count 90 degree turns and such, and when I went to college in Boston, where the roads meander aimlessly, I was soon cured of believing I had a good sense of direction.

This was all in the 50s to the 70s, so GPS was nowhere in my life. Maps were.

Lol, you might be right. Wasn't that when doctors made house calls?

I must have been born without a sense of direction gene. Before GPS, I remember I'd huddle in my hotel room in fear of going out to eat when I went on conferrences or inspections. If I leave the hotel, I'd never be able to find it, even if I only walked a couple of blocks.

About 50 yrs ago, when my wife & I moved from Calif to Chicago, we must have taken wrong turns every other hour along the way! She was not much help in finding directions on a paper map either. To make it worse, sometimes she was right, so I didn't know whether to trust her or not ????????.

I remember wanting a compass on my dashboard. I suspect I found aligning it (swinging it in naval parlance) daunting as it was in a steel "box".

Remember the floating automotive compasses that attached to the dash or windshield? They were a magnetic cylinder or ball floating in some type of liquid or light oil encased in an enclosure about the size of an egg with a small window. The directions were painted on the floating part so the direction you were currently headed would show through the little window. They were once as common as steering wheel spinner knobs, but it would now be rare to see one.

hello

When the red arrow on the compass (in the gps) points to 3 o'clock, you're actually going west!

Wrap your head around that for a minute....

Your not alone.

maps, lots of AAA maps in car

would always pick up an "Atlas" and leave it in the map pocket.

Then ask a relative such as my mom to get me AAA maps (I don't believe in AAA lol--one thing that irked me as recently as 10 years ago when I did join--everyone is paying a different price, me, the highest, $30/yr more).

Even now I keep a road atlas in the car.

I love maps, but admittedly kinda need them. My sense of direction was never that great.

Many of the visitor/information centers have free maps I believe. Also, you can google "Free Map Request *insert state*" and they'll send you one.
You can get tons of tourism info by request.

Keeps the latest DeLorme Atlas books in the car for the states were we travel. She likes to get the "big picture" rather than squint at the GPS screen. The books are also easier to use since you don't have to fold them up.

ADC map books that I still have to this day

I bought the US map atlas during my first long drive in 2015. Although I have Garmin and Google Maps, I always keep that atlas in my car for emergencies.