We have a street like that here that I avoid whenever possible. I like to call it the warp zone. I can head West on it and end up further East then I started. Still not sure how that happened.
Actually, just as a general rule, since Milwaukee has a grid system, unless I know an area well or had a chance to look a map beforehand* I usually stay away from the angled streets. I know they’re faster, but you’ll also get lost faster as well.
*And now that I have a GPS built into my car, it’s pretty trivial to punch in the address at a red light if I get off course.
I always try to orient myself in a strange place. In Montreal it is complicated by the fact that the direction called east is only about 15 degree from true north. So the sun rises nearly in nominal south and so on. I suspect this came about because the St. Lawrence, which mostly flows nearly from west to east, takes a left turn and flows nearly due north by the island. But the streets that meet it at right angles are still called north/south streets and every uses those directions in town.
I suffered a weird case of cognitive dissonance once in the London Tube. I has taking a train to Heathrow and therefore heading close to due west. But I someone could not shake the feeling that I was going east. I was in a seat facing north and “felt” I was facing south. It took my ten minutes to shake this feeling, though intellectually I know it was wrong.
When I come out of the Times Square subway in NY, I have to stop for a minute to orient myself before moving on. In most subway stations I automatically know from which way the train was going and the turns I took on the way out to know, but Times Square is just too confusing. Too many trains on too many platforms going in too many directions.
In Anchorage, it was a piece of cake. You can see the mountains from anywhere in the city and they’re to the east. Here in Portland, not so much. We’ve been here two years and I still get turned around.
People new to Santa Barbara who have lived for any length of time on the West Coast get all sorts of confused. The Pacific Ocean is directly to the South.
It depends on where I am, and thinking about it is a custom I acquired in the US (in Spain we don’t give directions using cardinal points; often what people call “north” turns out to be anything from “west by northwest” to “north by north-east”, as it actually means “the direction our cold wind comes from”). If I am in a place where I lived for a long time before first moving Over There, I need to think about it harder.
My vote was for “Sometimes but I might have to think about it” because I have been known to get turned around at night in cloudy conditions. If it’s daylight and there’s not a total overcast I can get my bearings from the sun. At night I can use the stars to get a sense of where North is. But I don’t have a natural north-finding sense.
I can nail the points of the compass in unfamiliar territory too, as long as the sky isn’t too cloudy. Fortunately, I’ve never been to England. “Is there no sun in this cursed country?”
Well, you got that exactly the wrong way around. Left and right are relative to a subjective frame of reference. East, west, north, and south are real points describing objective physical reality.
IMHO, cardinal directions are harder in the Midwest because they have all those little streams getting in the way. And then roads follow those streams, so you can get all turned around.
It’s often a mistake to ask an old-timer, because you’re likely to get directions that say something like, “then you turn where the Halo Burger was torn down in '56…”
Portland, Oregon, is an EASY place to get discombobulated, because their freakin’ streets are on the DIAGONAL.
Gimme a nice, plain, boring, N-S, E-W grid any day. And a double fie on city planners who decide to give names like Fir Street, Fir Avenue, Fir Boulevard, Balsam Fir Lane, and Fir Valley Highway all within a quarter-mile of each other.
~VOW
This.
I usually know the compass points when I’m outside – not because I’m good at reading shadows, but just because I know maps.
Where I get in trouble is asking, inside a large building, for directions to my destination outside the building. The direction-giver will just point but by the time I’ve turned a few times, looking for an elevator or whatever, I’ve lost orientation and that pointing becomes pointless. :smack:
Other way around…NSEW is concrete and immutable no matter which way you’re oriented. Left or right is a concept dependent on which way you’re facing.
Landmarks are fallible, not necessarily permanent and often open to interpretation.
No. My sense of direction is so bad that, if were considered a concrete sense like sight, I would count as location-blind. I can follow maps quite well if I’m somewhere where I can see street signs or obvious landmarks, but only for a very short distance. So, in London, it’s relatively OK because there are maps at every bus stop (Washington was good for this too). In the centre of Soho there are no bus-stops; I get lost every time I go there, which is quite often. I can barely follow left and right, let alone north and south.
I get lost leaving lifts which open on both sides, in small corridors, everywhere. I even got briefly lost in a walk-in closet one time - just couldn’t figure out where the door was amidst all the coats. When working a in cafe, I would get disoriented inside the walk-in freezer. It was OK, because the door is always really obvious to get to so the disorientation lasted a second or two, but I’d put something on a shelf, move stuff around, then half the time I’d walk towards the back of the freezer instead of the front.
If you ask me where the main road is outside my house - and this comes up a lot, when I want to tell people which bus stop to head for - I can’t tell you without moving to the window which faces that road and pointing out of it.
Over the years I’ve improved. I keep a map with me, never try to pay attention to anything beyond the first two instructions in a set of directions (more than that, and I’ll forget the first two as well), take extra time to go places, etc. I also started playing logic games like chess in the hopes that it would help.
If I had a better sense of direction, I’d probably weigh about fifty pounds more than I do now, because I walk or cycle a hell of a lore more than I would if I didn’t get lost all the time.
I answered “always” based on the OP’s qualifier of “familiar territory”, but it’s more complicated than that. Some places, I can always tell, consistently and correctly. Some places I can always tell consistently wrong. And some places I have no sense of direction at all. Fortunately, both Cleveland (where I grew up) and Bozeman (where I live now) are places where I’m consistently correct.
Naturally, this drives me completely batty, because of course, I use the same method in Cleveland. I can always tell which way the lake is (how, I’m not quite sure, but I can always tell), and that’s North, damn it. Toronto, I can adjust to, because I just have to remind myself that everything is reversed, but in Chicago or Milwaukee, I always have to stop to think about which way everything is twisted.
Oh, and I realized long ago that different peoples’ sense of direction work differently, so when I’m giving directions, I always make sure to cover all the bases. “OK, from anywhere in town, the closest mountain, with the big M on it, is northeast. If you’re approaching from the east, you’ll get off the highway at the 19th street exit, and turn left (south). You’ll continue that way on 19th for about a mile until the road goes over a ridge-- That’s Main Street. There’s another light on Babcock, just past main, and then a half-mile past that is the next light, which is College Street.”, etc. I try to include compass points, relative directions, and landmarks, and tie them together as much as possible. I figure whoever I’m giving the directions to can take it on themselves to ignore whichever parts of the directions are irrelevant to them.
I have no innate sense of direction whatsoever. “North” could be anywhere. On the other hand, I can read a map and use printed maps & directions to get from point to point very well.
My mother always knows where the cardinal directions are. And she can’t navigate at all. She could head east easily, but she can’t figure out how to get somewhere without explicit instructions.
Only if I’m somewhere familiar, where I’ve already worked it out. Like, say, I know I am currently facing north. Take me to someone else’s house, and I’m going to be lost pretty quickly. IN fact, I’d do better out in an open field, as at least then I’d have the stars or sun to go by, though I probably wouldn’t bother.
I think its a matter of the orientation of the streets etc in your location. I grew up in New Jersey, where there were no NS or EW roads. I think that"s due to roads following older trails, etc. In NJ directions were always given as “turn left at so and so, turn right at the corner”, etc. These directions were, of course highliy dependent on the direction you were travelling.
When we moved to Indiana everyone gave directions in compass points…head north on X, turn west on Y, etc. This was easy to do because all of the city streets and most highways go NS or EW. I was freaked out at first, but now I can point to a compass point on command.
Its very handy.
I sometimes have to think about it. North and south are fairly easy (the lake and the CN Tower are in the south), but east and west I have to think about (“Never…Eat…Shredded…turn west!”).
I find it a little odd that people can’t figure it out, especially on sunny days, familiar territory or not. Sun rises in the east, sets in the west the globe over. If it’s morning, and the shadows are pointing that way, then that way is west. There will be some variations depending upon latitude, of course, but for the vast majority of us that live between 45-degrees south/60-degrees north latitude, this works.