I remember driving from Toronto Ontario to Phoenix Arizona over 3 days with only paper maps. That’s over 3,500 kilometres of travel before the era of ‘Sat Nav’ and GPS. A wrong turn wasn’t met by auditory instructions to turn around, or automatic rerouting. No, it was followed by being oblivious until you saw a highway sign that told you that you are on the wrong road, or looking for the name of an exit you saw, only to realize it’s on a different highway.
You’d drive into a city at night and then start looking for a hotel. No google searches or cell phones to call anywhere in advance. No instructions to get back on the highway unless you asked at the front desk.
But it was usually the last 5-10 kilometres that were the toughest. Highways are well labeled on maps, but side streets are a whole other story. You could spend 4 hours traveling at the maximum speed limit and make great time, only to flounder in the last few minutes and spend 20 minutes lost and frustrated.
I remember being lost in a suburban community with my wife once and we gave up, just deciding to follow another car out of the maze of houses we were in… only to be disappointed when he turned into his driveway. We were quite embarrassed after circling the cul-de-sac and the person we followed was standing outside his car wondering who we were and why we followed him?
It was a different time, and one I’m not yearning to repeat. I’m happy to have Waze or Google Maps take all the mystery out of driving somewhere I’ve never been before. I am glad my daughters don’t have to navigate with a paper map, although they will never know the joy of driving over the paper crease where you folded the map, leaving a section that you spent hours driving through. Unfortunately phones can be as big or bigger a distraction than a paper map, but make no mistake, when it came to trying to read a paper map, your attention was definitely not on the road.
We are over the fold now, never to return to the era of paper maps. There are no creases on a digital map, no more folding, unfolding, and refolding. No more getting totally lost with no clue what to do next. We can always have a little voice telling us that we are rerouting, and always have a digital line we can follow.
