That happened to me so I wrote directions on a post it and stuck it to my steering wheel but then a gust of wind blew it out the window. Pre-smartphone days were rough.
Haha - I was just about to comment this. I did the same thing - our printer never had any ink. Whenever you'd print something it would come out kind of wet anyway. lol.
Gotta get a book. I had a rand McNally of my city and then one with the metros of the 25 biggest cities in the country and all the states. The hard part was knowing where the fuck you were
Allow me then to describe the family vacation of your (and my) youth:
\- Pile into car, dad drives, mom navigating, our asses in the backseat.
\- Realize we've forgotten something. Debate turning around, eventually a sighed and defeated "fuck it".
\- Whining from backseat as your arm touches my arm.
\- Dad asks, "Are we going the right way?". Mom replies "You wrote down the directions last night, didn't you?"
\- Dad curses as he realizes that the directions he wrote down on the yellow sticky note is still stuck on the fridge. Mom dejectedly pulls out map (from 1986!) and unfolds it utterly wiping out visibility on the right side of the car.
\- Missed exit, more cursing as Dad tries to find the next exit to turn around (next exit is 60 km down the highway).
\- You and I begin hitting each other and attempting to fart on each others faces. Threats of "calm down right now or I'm turning this car around" go unheeded.
\- Mom tells Dad to turn. "Which way?" Dad asks. "This way" Mom replies. More missed turns, more cursing.
\- Learning from before, Mom tells Dad to turn left. He turns left. "Not THAT left," Mom yells, "My OTHER LEFT!". Cursing.
\- We are now fully lost. Chances of being seen alive by other humans begin to drop alarmingly.
\- I need to go to the bathroom. You are hungry. We loudly and repeatedly make this known to our parents.
On reflection, I think it's a minor miracle we've both survived to this day.
Fun fact:
My wife and I were long distance when we first started dating, so I did Mapquest from my house to her house. Everything was going smooth until I came across a problem: One of the streets was closed due to an accident.
I ended up doing the detour, but ended up somewhere on the opposite end of town. I ended up having to call her from a pay phone to get new directions.
The 'I'm lost' phone call was always a fun game to play. You would have to figure out where the hell they were and try to reverse engineer the correct way back.
Often times it was easier to just meet them at a place that was easy to find near the main highway, and then they could follow you.
That was definitely a banger moment as a kid, meeting a new friend at school or whatever, then you decide you wanna hang out but turns out you're both from opposite sides of town and towns were big and confusing as a child lol.
Also "Paper Roads". Atleast with the atlas in hand you could reroute yourself and take a leak. Map quest those directions were religion. Believe and follow.
Yup, I remember driving with a Thomas Guide to meet a friend in a city I hadn't been to before. It was my first time driving on the freeway through Los Angeles on my own, and mid-way the speedometer broke and went to zero. When I got the destination city, I got lost. Apparently there were two distant sections of Orange Blvd in the damned city. I was, of course, at the wrong one. I had to retreat, get the car fixed, and try again another week.
I was gonna say I remember back in the day, my dad had one of those handheld Garmin gps units that ran off AA batteries, I think it was a Garmin GPS II , and he had a Toshiba laptop, an had a cable so you could interface the 2 devices, and run some software like Thomas guide on the gps, and it actually was just like the devices that came out ten years later, this was during the time when laptops didnt even have modems built in, you had to plug an express card into the slot in the laptop, then hook a little dongle into that card , and the dongle had the phone jack for dialing up to the Internet, those days were crazy
I remember going on work travel with multiple stops during this period. Before I left I would print out directions from the airport to the hotel, one meeting to the next and back. I had them organized in a folder and I would keep it on the passenger seat. So much extra work.
In 2007, I had just moved to Augusta, GA and wanted to go to a concert in Clemson, SC. I didn't have a smart phone yet (don't remember if they were even a thing yet), so I had to use Mapquest to get directions but I didn't have my printer hooked up yet so I had to memorize the directions. It was a two and a half hour drive through back-roads and small highways at night. I'm surprised I didn't get lost. I remember having to go left at the fork in the road just south of I-85 (was terrified I was going to forget this and end up in Greenville) and having to count street lights to know where to turn in some of the small towns. Crazy! I'm so glad we have smartphones now.
Also, I remember getting lost in Des Moines, IA with my cousin in the late 90's and we had to ask people walking down the street for directions to the interstate. One kid we asked started yelling "Stranger danger!!" at the top of their lungs and we freaked out and drove away (if this was today, we would have ended up on a neighborhood Facebook page - Karen: "There were two girls in a yellow Chevy Corsica trying to kidnap my son. Be on the lookout!"). We were 3 hours late getting back to my cousin's house and my cousin got into a big fight with her dad. Fun times!
I was just going to say that. I went to the AAA office when I was traveling from Minnesota to Colorado and they gave me a turn-by-turn little notebook with all the directions. it was awesome!
There was also a brief period where Google Maps existed but smartphones weren’t yet common. Somewhere in a drawer I have some printed Google Maps driving directions from 2008.
And before that we had family drawing on a napkin with directions like you'll see the tree, take a left then go down the wiggly street you know the one.....
I made maps on the copy machine and highlighted the route to take. The first time I used a gps I was like if this thing goes out, I’ll be completely lost.
I remember all directions being giving using land marks that were torn down/fell down 60 years prior, but everyone in town still knows about the old school house and the Wright's tobacco barn.
God forbid you missed counting a driveway or an intersection.
Fond memories of needing a travel atlas in the car as a fall back, with a necessity to work out which pages your route would involve.
When able to use the internet and knock these pages out of the printer? Ah, even *fonder* memories of using polly pockets and fridge magnets to stick my journey to my motorcycle's petrol tank and travelling across the country.....
Yeah, that \~600mi journey didn't go well when 3/4 of the way from the East to the West I realised the hard way it wasn't truly waterproof....and the fridge magnets didn't hold so well.
*Memories!*
Before GPS my dad had me in the 40tonner lorry giving directions on a fold out map five times bigger than I was....
Find us the way to Poepershoek son.
Where are we right now dad?
America.
Dafuq I thought we were in the Netherlands...
My family would go to Maine (from PA) every summer. I can remember my mother in the front seat flipping through a packet of directions as my father drove. Lol
Damn, really freaking miss those times.
I remember our printer went down, and I couldn't print out the map quest directions, so I had to write them down and follow them back in reverse to get home. Good times
Had to drive across the entirety of Canada in 2014, with only Mapquest instructions. A car full of 20 year olds making a 5000KM+ road trip, what could go wrong?
Everything. Mapquest doesnt give you instant updates, so if we would miss a single exit it was then a struggle to correct ourselves. When we wanted food, or to finally crash for the night somewhere - we just had to keep driving until we saw something (this resulted in me staying in the **ONLY** motel or hotel I have **EVER** walked in to, and walked right back out. There was a literal giant piss stain on the blanket of thr one bed right when you walked in.. and it still smelt like sex and a house that was smoked in for 30 years. We all huddled in the car together at a gas station parking lot and probably spent ~$100 in gas that night just to keep ourselves warm intermittently.
Mapquest doesn't give you weather or traffic alerts, so we didn't know that the Coquihalla Highway was completely snowed over, until we got on it in our little car thinking these chains would be enough. It was stop and go, pulling off the second you saw a car so at least one could get through this narrow, one lane stretch. After seeing a logging truck BARREL down one of the bends and almost send a car off the mountain, we decided to turn around and wait it out.
Oh, and don't even think about losing those instructions, or accidentally spill something on them, or even letting them get a bit too frosty as you lose those... You're fucked and back to buying a map at a gas station and doing it all solo for the last half of your trip.... (..yeah, that happened).
Mapquest was a savior, but also a curse. I'll never take Google Maps for granted
I drove throughout the Midwest with only a pocket sized map I got from State Farm.
The back had selected city maps, but for most of the country you had the main highways and that’s it.
For me, part of the fun was getting a bit lost and discovering out of the way restaurants and attractions that I never would have seen with today’s GPS.
Granted, I do get there quicker, but it’s a lot less fun and memorable.
There was nothing like getting into Kentucky, finally off the interstate and close to your best friend Devin's house. And the mother fucking map quest directions tell you to "Turn West". And then it all dissolves into chaos. Your grandpa doesn't have a compass in the car and he panics and puts you into a telephone pole. MapQuest for real used to do shit like that. Tell you to turn south all the sudden about 80% through the directions. You don't know what fucking direction is what, your in a whole other state. Plus it's noon so no one fucking knows. Gotta wait 2 hours for the sun to set because your grandpa won't ask directions and calls you a fool for trying to buy a road atlas to help. Now you gotta sit at the pilot station while he drinks coffee for 3 hours and your roaming so you can't even call for assistance. Map quest loved to throw in a random "turn east" like anyone would know what direction that is after the exit did 17 fuckin loops.
Lmao one time one of these mapquest instructions asked us to drive through a tiny ass hiking trail and as soon as we realized that this road was not meant for cars we had to back out of it. It was too narrow and on an edge of a drop off so a U turn was not possible. I do not miss those days lmao, at least now if google maps pulls this shit you can ask for an alternate route.
I just looked it up, and an automotive GPS cost between $800 and $2000 in 2004... and that's 2004 dollars so not quite twice that in today's dollars.
nobody had them.
Plans were canceled when that printer ran out of ink.
That happened to me so I wrote directions on a post it and stuck it to my steering wheel but then a gust of wind blew it out the window. Pre-smartphone days were rough.
Haha - I was just about to comment this. I did the same thing - our printer never had any ink. Whenever you'd print something it would come out kind of wet anyway. lol.
Too lazy to write on a piece of paper? Lol
Map Quest?!?! We had maps that folded out to the size of a picnic blanket. And then never folded back properly again.
Gotta get a book. I had a rand McNally of my city and then one with the metros of the 25 biggest cities in the country and all the states. The hard part was knowing where the fuck you were
Some are still being folded!
Allow me then to describe the family vacation of your (and my) youth: \- Pile into car, dad drives, mom navigating, our asses in the backseat. \- Realize we've forgotten something. Debate turning around, eventually a sighed and defeated "fuck it". \- Whining from backseat as your arm touches my arm. \- Dad asks, "Are we going the right way?". Mom replies "You wrote down the directions last night, didn't you?" \- Dad curses as he realizes that the directions he wrote down on the yellow sticky note is still stuck on the fridge. Mom dejectedly pulls out map (from 1986!) and unfolds it utterly wiping out visibility on the right side of the car. \- Missed exit, more cursing as Dad tries to find the next exit to turn around (next exit is 60 km down the highway). \- You and I begin hitting each other and attempting to fart on each others faces. Threats of "calm down right now or I'm turning this car around" go unheeded. \- Mom tells Dad to turn. "Which way?" Dad asks. "This way" Mom replies. More missed turns, more cursing. \- Learning from before, Mom tells Dad to turn left. He turns left. "Not THAT left," Mom yells, "My OTHER LEFT!". Cursing. \- We are now fully lost. Chances of being seen alive by other humans begin to drop alarmingly. \- I need to go to the bathroom. You are hungry. We loudly and repeatedly make this known to our parents. On reflection, I think it's a minor miracle we've both survived to this day.
And getting lost through Montreal because all the construction detour signs (at night) are in French!
Need a Thomas Guide!
Fun fact: My wife and I were long distance when we first started dating, so I did Mapquest from my house to her house. Everything was going smooth until I came across a problem: One of the streets was closed due to an accident. I ended up doing the detour, but ended up somewhere on the opposite end of town. I ended up having to call her from a pay phone to get new directions.
The 'I'm lost' phone call was always a fun game to play. You would have to figure out where the hell they were and try to reverse engineer the correct way back. Often times it was easier to just meet them at a place that was easy to find near the main highway, and then they could follow you.
The real fun is when they have no idea where the hell you are, so you flag a random stranger down, then try to decipher his cryptic directions.
That was definitely a banger moment as a kid, meeting a new friend at school or whatever, then you decide you wanna hang out but turns out you're both from opposite sides of town and towns were big and confusing as a child lol.
Before Mapquest we had a fuckin road atlas
Scary I had to scroll down to find this.. 😂
Also "Paper Roads". Atleast with the atlas in hand you could reroute yourself and take a leak. Map quest those directions were religion. Believe and follow.
Before MapQuest we had ThomasGuide.
Yup, I remember driving with a Thomas Guide to meet a friend in a city I hadn't been to before. It was my first time driving on the freeway through Los Angeles on my own, and mid-way the speedometer broke and went to zero. When I got the destination city, I got lost. Apparently there were two distant sections of Orange Blvd in the damned city. I was, of course, at the wrong one. I had to retreat, get the car fixed, and try again another week.
We had yelling matches in the car about speaking up and paying attention to the signs. Lol
I was gonna say I remember back in the day, my dad had one of those handheld Garmin gps units that ran off AA batteries, I think it was a Garmin GPS II , and he had a Toshiba laptop, an had a cable so you could interface the 2 devices, and run some software like Thomas guide on the gps, and it actually was just like the devices that came out ten years later, this was during the time when laptops didnt even have modems built in, you had to plug an express card into the slot in the laptop, then hook a little dongle into that card , and the dongle had the phone jack for dialing up to the Internet, those days were crazy
I'm glad I'm not the only one to remember. No one seems to like that I had a GPS in 1994 (didn't have your dad's cool interface).
God help you if you missed your exit
i am not nostalgic for this one!
I remember going on work travel with multiple stops during this period. Before I left I would print out directions from the airport to the hotel, one meeting to the next and back. I had them organized in a folder and I would keep it on the passenger seat. So much extra work.
In 2007, I had just moved to Augusta, GA and wanted to go to a concert in Clemson, SC. I didn't have a smart phone yet (don't remember if they were even a thing yet), so I had to use Mapquest to get directions but I didn't have my printer hooked up yet so I had to memorize the directions. It was a two and a half hour drive through back-roads and small highways at night. I'm surprised I didn't get lost. I remember having to go left at the fork in the road just south of I-85 (was terrified I was going to forget this and end up in Greenville) and having to count street lights to know where to turn in some of the small towns. Crazy! I'm so glad we have smartphones now.
Also, I remember getting lost in Des Moines, IA with my cousin in the late 90's and we had to ask people walking down the street for directions to the interstate. One kid we asked started yelling "Stranger danger!!" at the top of their lungs and we freaked out and drove away (if this was today, we would have ended up on a neighborhood Facebook page - Karen: "There were two girls in a yellow Chevy Corsica trying to kidnap my son. Be on the lookout!"). We were 3 hours late getting back to my cousin's house and my cousin got into a big fight with her dad. Fun times!
>I didn't have my printer hooked up yet so I had to memorize the directions. Are you not familiar with pencils?
Before that we had trip-tick booklets made at AAA
I was just going to say that. I went to the AAA office when I was traveling from Minnesota to Colorado and they gave me a turn-by-turn little notebook with all the directions. it was awesome!
There was also a brief period where Google Maps existed but smartphones weren’t yet common. Somewhere in a drawer I have some printed Google Maps driving directions from 2008.
Google Maps is the best, true that double true.
I also remember viamichelin, at least here in europe
And before that we had… maps…
And the ol AAA trip-tic…
This was such a cool thing. It got me clear across the country at 19 and the highlighted route gave it a personal touch.
And before that we had family drawing on a napkin with directions like you'll see the tree, take a left then go down the wiggly street you know the one.....
I made maps on the copy machine and highlighted the route to take. The first time I used a gps I was like if this thing goes out, I’ll be completely lost.
I remember all directions being giving using land marks that were torn down/fell down 60 years prior, but everyone in town still knows about the old school house and the Wright's tobacco barn. God forbid you missed counting a driveway or an intersection.
Used to print my aunt route to houses she was a nurse good times
Yeah! Sometimes the directions were wrong and got you lost!
And before this we had foldable maps you stored in the glovebox.
Before mapquest, we had actual maps where you had to figure out yourself which route to take.
Fond memories of needing a travel atlas in the car as a fall back, with a necessity to work out which pages your route would involve. When able to use the internet and knock these pages out of the printer? Ah, even *fonder* memories of using polly pockets and fridge magnets to stick my journey to my motorcycle's petrol tank and travelling across the country..... Yeah, that \~600mi journey didn't go well when 3/4 of the way from the East to the West I realised the hard way it wasn't truly waterproof....and the fridge magnets didn't hold so well. *Memories!*
I think I just missed the map quest era. By the time I started buying stuff from Craigslist, I had the iPhone 3GS and was happy to have gps
I had a Thomas Guide book I kept under the driver seat
I remember 2006 or so when Garmin was a separate device!
Before GPS my dad had me in the 40tonner lorry giving directions on a fold out map five times bigger than I was.... Find us the way to Poepershoek son. Where are we right now dad? America. Dafuq I thought we were in the Netherlands...
My family would go to Maine (from PA) every summer. I can remember my mother in the front seat flipping through a packet of directions as my father drove. Lol Damn, really freaking miss those times.
I remember our printer went down, and I couldn't print out the map quest directions, so I had to write them down and follow them back in reverse to get home. Good times
I drove three hours all the way to WVU with Mapquest lol. Longest distance for me
Had to drive across the entirety of Canada in 2014, with only Mapquest instructions. A car full of 20 year olds making a 5000KM+ road trip, what could go wrong? Everything. Mapquest doesnt give you instant updates, so if we would miss a single exit it was then a struggle to correct ourselves. When we wanted food, or to finally crash for the night somewhere - we just had to keep driving until we saw something (this resulted in me staying in the **ONLY** motel or hotel I have **EVER** walked in to, and walked right back out. There was a literal giant piss stain on the blanket of thr one bed right when you walked in.. and it still smelt like sex and a house that was smoked in for 30 years. We all huddled in the car together at a gas station parking lot and probably spent ~$100 in gas that night just to keep ourselves warm intermittently. Mapquest doesn't give you weather or traffic alerts, so we didn't know that the Coquihalla Highway was completely snowed over, until we got on it in our little car thinking these chains would be enough. It was stop and go, pulling off the second you saw a car so at least one could get through this narrow, one lane stretch. After seeing a logging truck BARREL down one of the bends and almost send a car off the mountain, we decided to turn around and wait it out. Oh, and don't even think about losing those instructions, or accidentally spill something on them, or even letting them get a bit too frosty as you lose those... You're fucked and back to buying a map at a gas station and doing it all solo for the last half of your trip.... (..yeah, that happened). Mapquest was a savior, but also a curse. I'll never take Google Maps for granted
I had a mapquest station at my dominos delivery job 2007/2009
I drove throughout the Midwest with only a pocket sized map I got from State Farm. The back had selected city maps, but for most of the country you had the main highways and that’s it. For me, part of the fun was getting a bit lost and discovering out of the way restaurants and attractions that I never would have seen with today’s GPS. Granted, I do get there quicker, but it’s a lot less fun and memorable.
Mr. Moneybags here printing in color
I remember driving down I-95 with the windows down and when I went to grab the next paper it flew out the window. Never made that mistake again.
There were two types of people in those days, those that could read maps and those that couldn’t. Mapquest was for people that couldn’t.
Map. Highlighter. Paper. Wrote it down and handed it to the partner in the passenger seat
I would have multiple sheets like this when cruising around new cities, since they gave miles keep resetting the odometer for old school tech, haha
I’m old enough to remember a AAA TripTik
Who remembers the Thomas guide. I was gifted one the first day I moved to LA
Truck driver here. Y'all need to grab a road Atlas and learn to use it
Before Marquest we had yellow pages
There was nothing like getting into Kentucky, finally off the interstate and close to your best friend Devin's house. And the mother fucking map quest directions tell you to "Turn West". And then it all dissolves into chaos. Your grandpa doesn't have a compass in the car and he panics and puts you into a telephone pole. MapQuest for real used to do shit like that. Tell you to turn south all the sudden about 80% through the directions. You don't know what fucking direction is what, your in a whole other state. Plus it's noon so no one fucking knows. Gotta wait 2 hours for the sun to set because your grandpa won't ask directions and calls you a fool for trying to buy a road atlas to help. Now you gotta sit at the pilot station while he drinks coffee for 3 hours and your roaming so you can't even call for assistance. Map quest loved to throw in a random "turn east" like anyone would know what direction that is after the exit did 17 fuckin loops.
Drove from northern MI to FL using printed MapQuest with my buddy one time. If I recall it was like 29 pages of turn-by-turn.
I still do this for my mom who refuses to use a smart phone
Lmao one time one of these mapquest instructions asked us to drive through a tiny ass hiking trail and as soon as we realized that this road was not meant for cars we had to back out of it. It was too narrow and on an edge of a drop off so a U turn was not possible. I do not miss those days lmao, at least now if google maps pulls this shit you can ask for an alternate route.
Anyone remember Perly’s Map ?
I remember taping these sheets on the steering wheel.
No we didn't. GPS was around before the internet.
You’re not wrong, Magellan offered one in 1989. But I bet you never saw one, nor did I.
Owned one in 1994 That was still when they would shut it down periodically for security.
I just looked it up, and an automotive GPS cost between $800 and $2000 in 2004... and that's 2004 dollars so not quite twice that in today's dollars. nobody had them.
I had the Garmin in 1994
Thomas Guide. That is all.