Anyone remember TripTik from AAA?
Before GPS I often used a TripTik.
I still use paper maps, because an unfolded map gives me a much better perspective on where I am, how far I’ve gone, how far I still have to go, and where to stop for gas, food, etc.
Frankly, I’d have more trouble getting out of an unfamiliar airport than the next 499 miles of the trip.
No problem–I’ve been taking road trips using paper maps for more than 40 years. Nowadays I might check google maps and look at street view of the address before heading out, but I still carry the AAA maps of the region(s) I’m traveling in as a hard-copy backup.
Downtown Dallas? All roads lead to Deep Ellum. Or into that vortex near Turtle Creek. 
Yup. Called TPCs; Tactical Pilotage Charts. Googling that can find you a few samples at very low resolution. The actual paper charts are about 4’ x 5’, printed on one side only and unwieldy as heck.
This Sectional aeronautical chart - Wikipedia is the civilian equivalent although TPCs had almost no aeronautical administrative info but instead much better terrain and landmark fidelity. And covered, shall we say, those parts of the world air commerce didn’t much care about.
The idea was you’d plan an ingress route to and egress route from a target area. Which might be 200+ miles each way to be flown at 500ish feet or less at 500ish knots or more. In the pre-GPS/INS days you did this by selecting prominent landmarks every 15-25 miles = 2-3 minutes along the way and zig-zagging from one to the next.
To make all this manageable in a cockpit half the size of an airliner lavatory you’d cut a strip out from a chart maybe 6" = 5 miles wide by 12" = 10 miles long. With your route running up the middle from bottom to top and the turn points prominently labeled. Along with time, distance and direction marks so you could monitor your progress with a stopwatch and know when & how much to turn for the next segment. Finally you tack together however many pieces it took to create a map 20’ long & 6" wide that you’d accordion fold for use in the cockpit. You’d use up a dozen or more maps making such a “mission strip”.
For training stateside we had route corridors we had to stay inside of. So folks tended to make one mission strip for each of the several local routes and reuse them over and over. When we got to go elsewhere and use unfamiliar terrain and maps boy the paper would be flying as 30 guys tried to quickly create fresh mission strips.
The advent of reasonably accurate, reliable INS in my era (and, after my time, GPS) made these maps secondary to loading coordinates into the computer then following that guidance. But during mission planning you still got those coordinates from reading the TPCs. And while flying you’d always track your position on the paper map as well. You haven’t been lost until you’ve been lost at 500 knots while people over the wrong hill are all set up to kill you for your error.
I hear nowadays this is all done with a Google Earth style of UI that makes things pretty easy. You can print paper mission strips and it’ll load all the computer data onto something like a USB stick you can carry out to the jet & plug in to upload. Total Star Wars vs. all the paper cutting, drawing, pasting, and keystroking in my era.
I haven’t actually tried to navigate by paper map in years, but I did it often enough in the Boy Scouts that I feel like it should be easy enough to do. That said, if I need navigation, most of the time I’ll just use Google Maps and a dashboard mount for my phone as an alternative to fussing with the paper map. Works as long as I can get a cell phone signal (so, not in most of the signal black hole that is the state of Wyoming…)
My wife has no sense of direction. It amazes me. I mean, how can you NOT know which way is North? Sure, if it is a cloudy night and you’re in a strange location and someone blindfolds you and spins you around few times, I can understand. But, in your own backyard at sunset?
Before we got married (which would have been in the days of paper maps), my future wife thought I had some kind of superpower because I could look at a map for a place I had never been and be able to drive there without consulting the map again. Of course, after we were married, I apparently lost all abilities I ever had and can’t even be trusted to drive without constant supervision and commentary, but that is another story.
USGS topographicals; I have files of them! And I snag any I can get free/cheap even if they are for places I don’t ever expect to be. Forget city streets; give me one of those and I can find my way across the Bridger Wilderness.
I actually prefer paper maps, still keep an atlas in my vehicle and will usually request a map from the state/city I am travelling to ahead of time.
I have the map program on my phone and one included in my vehicle too; and I use them, but I always have the paper back ups with me. The paper backups include a note with hand written directions as a back up to the back up.
The one time I tried to rely completely on the phone maps, (Still had my atlas, just didn’t refer to it at all), I was travelling through Tennessee into Georgia which took me through Chattanooga, TN. I passed a sign that said “Welcome to Georgia”. A short time later, I pass another sign that said “Welcome to Tennessee”. This confused me enough that I pulled over and pulled out the atlas, thinking that I had made a U-turn without realizing it. Turns out I was on a highway that meandered along the border…back on the road again for a few and I pass a third sign that said “Welcome to Georgia”…made me want to run up to the sign and paint “AGAIN” under it.
After that, I went back to referring to the paper maps and writing everything down.
My point of failure lies in the destination city. If you want me to find my way to an address in Boston, get the heck out of here, no way. But if you want me to head on up to an address in Grand Forks, sure! It’s the final navigation of tiny city streets that gets to me - and I just have almost no patience for the tiny, cramped, every-which-way roads of many east coast cities.
My parents were good at the paper map thing. But I got them a GPS and they’ve never looked back. There was nothing they hated more than missing the highway exit outside (big city) and then mom scrambling to see what the next exit should be, saying “take exit 56!!” and then dad yelling, “I just passed exit 56 tell me another one!!”. No more of that. Much happier.
I voted probably. I would use a Thomas Guide.
I have fond memories of the old paper version AAA ‘triptiks’. I liked the reassuring solid feel of a paper map in my hand, showing the course that lie ahead, as opposed to some electronic voice harping at you “turn left one half mile”
I chose “No problem” as my answer, but I must now amend my answer.
It would be absolutely no problem for me , as long as the destination city was anything other than Mexico City. There is no way I could navigate to a specific address that wasn’t marked on the map.
Even Google Maps and Waze give up in CDMX.
Heck yeah. These days I navigate by printing out Google Maps beforehand because they’re more up to date than an old atlas and I don’t drive enough to buy a new atlas every year, plus even with an atlas I’d still be printing out Google Maps of the zoomed in, detailed location I was navigating to, so why use two media when you can use one?
I did get lost once recently trying to navigate without a map, but I happened to have my handheld GPS on me in the cupholder tray, so I had to fiddle with it at stop lights until I found my way back.
I’ve always been good with maps and spatial orientation. I usually travel by myself. I don’t usually use a paper map while traveling by myself because it’s hard to read a map with reading glasses and drive 75 on the highway at the same time.
My preferred method is to review the google map several times in advance, reading over the exit numbers or town names so that I get them in my memory. Use google street view to drop in and get a visual reference for my turn (Hello, CVS in Burnet). I might right down a couple of things on an index card in LARGE print.
My dad is one of those who turns on the GPS whenever he gets in the car. Verbal “turn here, turn here” directions annoy me intensely.
This.
I recall a few years ago one of the brands came up with a gimmick to “skin” the directions with downloadable voice files. So now Sophia Loren or Harrison Ford could be giving you directions instead of that artificial nasally android-Hungarian.
I always wanted a way to hack into folks’ devices and force-install my own “skin”. Imagine Mr. T at full volume:
I pity da’ foo’ who don’ turn lef’ in 200 feet!!!"
My dad worked for Rand McNally the first 25 years of my life - buying and maintaining their big presses and managing a few of their plants. My first couple of summer jobs were there as well. Suffice it to say maps and atlases were constants.
To this day, I prefer paper maps to GPS. My kids have mocked my preference for generating an on-line map ahead of time, and printing it out to bring along.
I can imagine a rare instance in which the “Turn left in 100 yds” would be useful. But the task in the OP would be no difficulty at all.
I navigated my way across the country twice, using a Rand McNally road atlas as my only nav source, before personal GPS navigators were a thing. Took a different route each time, with impulse diversions for sightseeing (“Hey, looks like the Grand Canyon is only about an hour or so off our route. Wanna go see it?”).
Navigated around northern Italy for a few months with only a Michelin regional map. Got us to 3 different ski resorts successfully.
FalconView. It’s a pretty cool tool. The KC-10 has a “mission laptop” with a GPS receiver and FalconView running in-flight, as a tertiary nav source and a SA boost. I picked up a lot of details of Middle East geography while flying OEF/OIF missions.
I remember Thomas Guides; I had one for Orange County, CA when I was stationed out there. I think we still have it, packed away in the basement somewhere.
I could probably do it, because I almost never simply rely on the directions from Waze or my maps app and do look over the route on the digital map before setting off. Just in case it wants to send me the wrong way down a one-way street or through an illegal U turn or to a left turn across four lanes of heavy traffic followed by a difficult merge 50 feet later. So I can revise or be mentally prepared.
But it’s been a long time since I used a paper map. I lost my iPhone abroad a couple of weeks ago and getting to the Verizon store to replace it without the use of the maps app on said phone was a bit of a trick. There’s a catch-22, huh? I felt like an idiot.
I knew when I created this that the answers would skew positive simply because the demographic here is more mature and experienced and less young and YouTube commenter who would drive off a cliff if Garmin said to.
An Ode to Skald the Rhymer who would usually tack a tasty recipe onto the end of his polls. I was just seriously distracted when pasting in the poll answers and put it in the wrong place. Mea Culpa.
Heck, those of us who delivered pizzas back in the 1980’s could probably do it blindfolded, at night, in the pouring rain just by smelling the lines on the map.