Serious question, how did people survive before GPS was a thing?

I was driving home from work last night around 3am and my phone died. I had to find my way back using just road signs and memory. It hit me that my grandpa drove a truck for 40 years across 12 states with nothing but paper maps. Found out later that the first consumer GPS device only came out in the early 2000s and cost like $500. It seems crazy now how we just expect to never get lost. Has anyone else had to navigate without GPS recently and felt totally lost?

2 comments

2 Comments

rileyw721mo ago

Oh, tell me about it. My husband and I took a trip out west about five years ago and my phone just died right in the middle of nowhere in Utah. We had to pull over at a gas station and buy a paper map, which neither of us had used in maybe fifteen years. It was like trying to read a foreign language at first - all those little lines and numbers and trying to figure out which road went where.

blair_gibson781mo ago

Oh man, that's exactly what happened to us in Oregon last year. My wife's GPS just gave up near some random forest road and we spent twenty minutes arguing over which way was north on this old gas station map. It was humbling, you know? Like we'd forgotten how to be adults who could find their way without a little blue dot telling us what to do.