I still write down driving directions, although taken from Google usually. I have them sent to my cell phone also. But I don’t like relying on devices when I’m traveling and writing down directions help embed them in my brain and I’ll have a backup should batteries or bars run down. I remember needing the Thomas Guides in LA, and various road atlases and folded maps in days gone by. When I moved here to RI in the 90s it was a bit surprising that I could get a road atlas with virtually every road in the state listed. There are many more roads now, plenty of development going on, but it could still be put in a single but larger volume now. That is comparison to LA where we needed multiple books to cover the San Fernando Valley and a few of the other areas.
When my wife and I travel together, we do navigate by GPS when we need to. The passenger is the navigator.
Pittsburgh, in the rain at night is interesting. It’s a city of bridges and constant lane changes. I’m not a native, my wife grew up there.
A side bar. I started driving in Denver. We use N,S,E,W. (except downtown). You really can’t use cardinal directions in Pittsburg. My wife does not navigate using cardinal directions. They are meaningless except for generalities in Pittsburgh. /sb
We spent two weeks in Ireland in 1995, and traveled all over the country in a rental car. We had a road atlas, created by the Ordnance Survey, and it had every single road in the country – even the tiniest dirt roads. Following that atlas, we once found ourselves driving across a meadow, which had a hypothetical dirt road running through it. 
Other. I have a couple of maps framed on the wall as art. One is a repro of my area circa 1850, another is the area where I grew up ca 1920.
I don’t have it anymore, but when I moved cross country in the mid 90s, my folks gave me a Rand McNally US atlas with the inscription of “Good luck on the road, but this will always lead you home.”
When I took my first cross-country (San Diego to Key West) road trip in 2002, I got around using AAA tour books and maps. As I made my way across the country I would stop in at AAA offices for regional and city maps.
When needed local directions I would print out maps at hotel computers or libraries. Another resource in those days were phone books–they often had street maps good enough to get me to where I wanted to go.
These days using google maps is very convenient and I don’t have to keep a “map in my head”, so to speak. On the other, when I’m driving around following verbal instructions from a computer with a tiny map displayed on my phone I often feel disoriented. It’s like I have no real sense of where I am in relation to the rest of the area.
Way back when, sometime in the mid 1980s, I and another engineer flew to Pittsburgh to do some recruiting at Carnegie Mellon University for the company we worked for. This was of course long before GPS was widely available. When we went to pick up our rental car, we found that in the rental office there was a terminal where you could type in the address where you wanted to go, and it would print out driving instructions (but no map). Being nerds, we thought that was very cool, so we got directions to our hotel that way and started driving. We soon discovered that whatever algorithm was used had routed us on surface streets in a very sketchy-looking part of town. We were sitting at stop lights while dangerous-looking groups of people eyed us and our shiny rental car. But since we had no map or knowledge of the area, we had no choice but to continue on that route. I was very relieved to reach the hotel unscathed.
When we told this story to one of our local contacts the next day, he laughed and said that we’d have gotten there faster on the freeway. The algorithm had apparently not chosen that route because it was very slightly longer.
I flew up to Seattle to visit my now-employer in the early-2000s. I visited my cousin in Puyallup, and then started, in the dark, to my hotel in Seattle. I only had hardcopies of Map Quest directions/map, and I got lost. I found two police cars parked nose-to-nose in a median, and pulled over to ask directions. The cop who came to my window looked horrified. ‘What are you doing here?’ I told him I was lost, and needed directions. He said I (a White guy in a rental car) shouldn’t be in that part of town. He gave me very specific instructions, and advised me not to stop. I had to laugh. I told him, ‘I’m from L.A., so…’
Obviously backcountry hiking maps are not what OP is talking about. But an intermediate area where I still always carry a paper map is the network of Forest Service dirt roads that I often drive to access trailheads. Google is getting steadily better at knowing these correctly, but traffic levels are orders of magnitude lower, so it’s not completely reliable.
I’ve always loved looking at maps, old, new, imaginary, whatever. And even tho we have a great GPS in our new car, if we’re going somewhere for ths first time, I’ll google the map before we leave. While I probably won’t recall all the specifics, I will have a map in my head of the general area. Because I must.
It’s one of my charming quirks - I like to know where I am relative to where I’m going.
When my cousin lived in L.A. she used to drive around with her left foot up on the dash and a Thomas Guide on her leg.
I used to have all kinds of paper maps back in the day. I had a small travel atlas of the entire U.S. along with a fold-up map of the state I lived in, plus city maps of places I lived. The map pocket in my car door was pretty full.
These days if I don’t know where I’m going, I’ll look on google maps. I’ll even go to street view so that when I get to where I need to turn I’ll know exactly which way to go. I’ll print out the directions, but after going through it ahead of time on google maps and street view I usually don’t need to look at the directions much, if it all.
I got rid of all of my paper maps years ago.
I don’t use my phone to navigate.
My mother was a AAA member and always got TripTiks for every long trip. Seeing those again brings back a lot of fond memories of childhood vacations.
We’d stop at the rental car counter and pick up a city map from them. If the agent was nice, they’d mark the best route to the hotel with a highlighter. The best part was their maps were usually sufficiently detailed enough on how to return the car to the airport.
I still plan out my route to a new destination, at home, on Google maps, before I go for two reasons.
First, the tolls around here can be crazy expensive & I’m willing to take a slight detour to save on some of them. For an additional 90 seconds (on a minimum 90 mile drive) I can save about $10 but to do that you need to navigate to intermediate way points.
I’m willing to pay the $17(!) Port Authority toll to get into NYC but if you set the GPS to ‘No tolls’ it routes you up to Albany which is the first free crossing over the Hudson; that’s only a 300 mile detour but I do want to avoid the $45ish (roundtrip) tolls on the turnpike so I have to do no tolls to N Joisey & then tolls to my next destination.
Second, the point of my roadster is the journey, not the destination. For the most part I try to avoid interstates & take the back roads, but again, a little bit of boring interstate can save a hell of a lot of time behind the wheel & after enough hours, I’m okay with that. I do a trip in it every year to an event/see friends. The quickest way up there is 3 hrs but the way I go is 5½-6 hrs of fun-to-drive twisty-turnies. However, after Hawk’s Nest it’s interstate the rest of the way & I still get out of the car with an ear-to-ear grin.
Finally, since I’m already taking the scenic route sometimes I’m willing to detour to see {whatever} but when planning the route you need to zoom in a bit to see those small towns to realize, "Hey, it’s only 10 miles outta the way to see the World’s Largest Rubberband Ball or some other stupid attraction; one needs the larger monitor to really plan that out.
So, yes, I’ll plan out my routes & write down some of the directions, at least the intermediate way points where I’m navigating to along the route. I just need to remember to reset the GPS to ‘no/allow highways’ &/or ‘no/allow tolls’ as appropriate for the next segment.
When driving to a new destination in town (or more realistically a nearby town I don’t know very well), I’ll look up a map using one of those computer things, then sketch a set of options on a 4x6 notecard or similar. If it’s somewhat complicated. Otherwise, I’ll just remember it.
Not going to have some phone talking to me. Nor be locked into one route that I can’t immediately transform into a different route for any reason that pleases me.
Maybe if Lyft drivers did similarly, or at least looked at the clearly marked signs in my neighborhood, they might actually be able to find my place. You know, delivery drivers and real cabbies have no problem with it.
Yup, these are the ones to use.
I don’t travel too much and when I do it’s between southern Oregon and north-central Montana. Navigating off of I-84 and through tri-cities is about the only place I rely on GPS. Otherwise i just kind of know the route.
But I always carry copies of the DeLorme atlas for each state I’ll be traveling through, just in case.
Of course, I also carry local 1:24000 maps when camping (CalTopo is a brilliant resource for this) or on the river, but that’s not really the same thing.
I used to have a Rand McNally “Six County” Chicago/Metro map book which I assume is the same you had. Big ole thick hardcover thing with a spiral binding. Kept it in the pocket behind the driver’s seat for a long time and finally got rid of it a few years ago. Like you said, it did take a little bit of a learning curve to figure out where you were to look up the grid coordinates and determine how to get to your destination but it was also invaluable when I needed it.
I use GPS to find specific addresses in town, and I like the feature that gives an indication of what traffic is like both in town and in the road. But, like others in this thread, I like being able to look at a map to get an overview of the route rather than rely on turn-by-turn GPS directions and the tiny map on my phone screen.
This is why I was never all that fond of the TripTik maps. They made me feel locked into one specific route, and sometimes I like trying an alternate way.
Both of our cars (2017 Ford Edge and 2019 Toyota Highlander) have decent GPS systems. I like to have my map showing on the screen; my wife does not. But we don’t use them for navigation, because it’s a pain in the ass to enter a location in them.
Instead, we use Google maps on our Android phones. Once the destination and route has been determined, we plug the phone into whichever vehicle we’re in and use Android Auto to guide us. Works great, although Google maps can get a bit verbose at times.
I have a framed map of the state of Colorado with a few inserts of the few towns. It was made in 1873. It’s very cool to me, I’m in GIS and work in Colorado.
It is not the original. I made a .jpg of it and printed it out on our monster plotter at work. It came out very well. I could study it for hours.
The original can be had for $11,000. Umm, no.
I never used one of the handmade TripTiks; that was, like, something my parents did. But I did use the printed, computer generated TripTiks a few times in the late aughts before I got my first smartphone. It was not unlike printing out MapQuest directions, but I preferred the online TripTiks because they were more detailed that what MapQuest gave you, with little inset maps showing the details of each area just like the old fashioned version.
For a while in the early '10s AAA offered a free* smartphone navigation app with turn by turn voice navigation which they actually called the TripTik app. This was back before Google Maps had that feature, and the only other apps with voice navigation were from the likes of Garmin and TomTom which you had to pay for. Once Google started offering that feature for free I imagine their app became kind of irrelevant.
*With your AAA membership.
Yep. Download Google maps for offline use and never worry about getting a connection to update your local view onscreen. Very useful when crossing mountainous regions or exploring foreign locales.