I took a cross-country roadtrip last year and *so* much of the planning and execution hinged on modern technology. Everything from directions to finding lodging and food to looking up what to do, we did a lot of it on our phones on the fly.
If you took a major trip like that more than 15-20ish years ago, what was it like? Did you have to plan things even more carefully ahead of time, or did you just wing it in a way that we wouldn’t today?
50 comments
AAA maps, TripTiks and TourBooks.
We used maps. There were also books (guides) and magazines with recommendations for best routes, lodging, and attractions.
Just like today, you could plan it, or wing it and see where the road takes you.
A bunch of maps and more planning ahead.
You could look up a huge amount of information in libraries. You could also call visitors bureaus in the places you were traveling to and ask for information. You could consult with a travel agent if you wanted help selecting and booking hotels. But you could also wing it, using paper maps to navigate. When you got to an area you stopped at a gas station and bought the local map and maybe asked about recommended restaurants and places to stay, or you just picked something that looked good. Atlas books and AAA guides had a lot of recommendations.
Oh, it was just maps and then it was printouts from google maps or that map site they used to have (can’t remember the name). Sometimes you’d get lost or there would be some details that weren’t captured on the map and then you’d be screwed until you asked someone or called someone. It was kind of funny.
I think the last trip I took without GPS was from a town in NJ to Ithaca NY. That was maybe 2011. And we toured the area too. After that though, we figured it was time.
The interstate system is pretty easy to navigate. Many people had the US travel maps that had the road network for the country and then broken down to the state level.
when i was a kid we used the Mobil Travel Guides
Rand McNalley road Atlas book, Mapquest printouts
1. Free maps from AAA.
2. Thomas atlases.
One word: MapQuest.
Transcontinental move, transferring from sea duty in Charleston, SC to shore duty at NSB Bangor.
Charleston->Winston-Salem NC (to visit family), no need for a map. I’d been driving that route back and forth for three years and had practically worn a groove.
Winston-Salem -> Memphis TN (Navy school), again no need for a map. I got on I-40 in Winston and followed it to Memphis, then followed handwritten directions to NAS Millington that I’d gotten by calling the school.
Memphis -> Rapid City SD (to visit a friend) TripTik from AAA. Two day trip, found a hotel in Kansas City MO by getting off the highway when I saw a sign for a Holiday Inn.
Rapid City -> Silverdale WA… Two day trip, but as all but the end of it was on I-90 the TripTik spent most of the time on the passenger seat. Found a no name motel in Montana by seeing a billboard shortly before the exit.
We always used Mapquest and would print out detailed maps of the route. Someone in the car (usually whoever was riding up front with the driver) was the designated navigator and would take care of the maps and make sure the driver didn’t miss a turn.
It was reading a map. Calling ahead to where you were going to find out what roads were under construction coming into town. AAA was a good resource. You allowed time for what might be ahead.
However, you wouldn’t need the resources you’re referring to until you were off the highway. That’s no different than today.
I did it with my father back in 2004. It was actually right around this time since we were gone mid october to mid november.
We had books of maps. Some of them were out of date and had different names on them. My father put me on navigator duties and it was pretty frustrating because he wanted constant up to date information for places we were not even heading. But the actual navigation was easy. The interstate system is pretty simple. If I recall, when we left Washington DC to head back to California we got on I-40 in Tennessee and then took it all the way to Arizona. There was really no navigation work to do. It was basically just keep going straight.
The lodging situation was mostly just rest stops, camping on the side of the road in rural areas, camping in parking lots where it was allowed.
There were times when we didn’t know exactly where we were but you have a pretty good idea of how to get where you need to go.
Went from Baltimore to Chicago and Baltimore to Fort Myers. The Chicago trip was with a road atlas and I don’t remember the second time but it might have also been that. Smart phones and GPS for your car had been around a few years at that point but I didn’t have either thing. That atlas was cool, it wasn’t super detailed but was more than enough to get around, and I mean it’s easy enough to find gas stations and restaurants and stuff when you’re traveling on the highway. My dad always had a bunch of the really detailed ones for each county in our state in his cars as a kid.
I also used to use MapQuest and then Google Maps before I had a smartphone. Being able to use GPS was actually one of my main reasons for buying one after a night trying to get to a friend’s party and getting lost a couple times.
I was thinking about an aspect of this the other day. We used to just *leave*… in the sense of, “I’m going on a 2-week trip to a destination 6 states away. If I see a payphone I might be able to call. If someone dies, hold the funeral without me. OkayBye!”
Used a map and those handy blue signs on the expressway telling you where restaurants and gas stations were at what exits.
Every home had a map and road atlas. Maps of larger cities had street indexes where you could locate the street where you had to go.
Also if you were going to someones house for the first time, you’d have to call them for directions. If you got lost you’d have to pull in to a gas station or grocery store and ask “which way is X street?”
Maps
A free map is usually available at the state “welcome center”/”visitor information center” which is usually within a few miles of the state line on each Interstate. If you stop there during business hours a lot of them even have staff available to make hotel/motel reservations for you.
Signs along the interstate indicate where there are gas stations, restaurants, etc available at each exit.
When I was a kid (’90s), my family did a road trip nearly every summer. Part of the preparation was going to a local AAA office and pick up maps for the places along our route. If necessary, we’d get other maps along our way. As for lodging, we usually camped at KOAs, and my mom would call ahead of time to reserve a site for each night. Everything else, we just pretty much winged it. We did keep a cooler full of snacks and drinks, but other meals were either at restaurants or purchased at grocery stores wherever we were.
I had a big atlas book in the car. Sometimes it’d look at it and then write notes for myself on where to turn or which freeway. And lots of road signs showed gas, food and lodging.
My family used a road atlas. If you did some planning beforehand, it wasn’t a big hassle.
You used a physical map. And just like today you could heavily plan things or wing it.
15-20ish years ago? Brah taking a roadtrip in 2007-2009 was a pain in the ass. My parents would just either remember routes, use a map, or plan with mapquest.
So besides your phone now telling you where to go and eat, one of the greatest things is diverting you because of traffic. This is huge! Way back when you would just suck it up and have to sit in traffic. Lose an hour or maybe the entire day.
Atlas books, talking to the hotel desk, and for fun things on the way, reading the brochures in that wooden stand near a payphone
Maps. You could buy them at any gas station. I still use them, particularly for initial planning, as you can see the whole route in a glance.
Most of our family youngsters (like those under 30) can’t read one. Takes all sorts of esoteric skills to use one, like knowing where north is( or being able to read a compass), how to use a map scale, multiplication without a calculator.
It’s a non-trivial exercise.
The atlas and road signs. Plot out your route, follow the signs, get detailed directions from your destination once you get off the highway. It’s really not difficult.
I did a number of them in ’89-’96 when I was in the USAF: Atlanta > Sacramento, Sacramento > Spokane, Spokane > Merced (5x total back-and-forth), Spokane > Atlanta (and back), Spokane > Minot, Minot > Atlanta.
Besides the methods everyone else has mentioned, you could go across country without any planning ahead if you stopped and got maps/brochures at each state welcome center.
One thing that I haven’t noticed mentioned yet is RV-centric travel back then. [The Good Sam Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Sam_Club) ~~used to put out~~ *still puts out* [a guidebook](https://www.campingworld.com/2021-good-sam-campground-coupon-guide-123301.html) which ~~had~~ *has* hundreds of thousands of entries for campgrounds & services. I haven’t bought one for a couple of decades, but IIRC entries were listed by a grid coordinate laid out over a state, and by interstate/state mile marker/exit. Each entry was only a few lines in “white pages” phone book tiny font, with rudimentary directions from an intersection, abbreviations for types of parking, hookup, and other services, and a phone number. It was incredibly helpful and I probably did ~8,000 miles of RV trips using it as my main camping/services guide.
From Utah to North Carolina, we had an atlas and my step-dad was a long haul trucker so he wrote down his favorite stops and places to avoid.
Later my (now ex) husband joined the military and we moved all over. We used an atlas for the first move from Utah to Kentucky, Mapquest for our move from Kentucky to Colorado and then by the time we went to Germany there was GPS. And we only drove from Colorado to North Carolina.
Before the internet you’d have a road atlas which is a book of maps for every single highway, city, and town in the United States. When I had my first cross country road trip my dad made me track our progress and map out the destination as we drove so I could know how to use one if for some reason I didn’t have access to gps. I don’t ever drive more than a couple states away and don’t need to consult maps or gps most of the time but I’m grateful I have that skill.
Google maps, then you print out the turn by turn.
Regular road maps.
Writing down directions, asking people along the way and maps / road atlases.
When I was 17 I ended up with a newspaper delivery gig in an area that I wasn’t familiar with. I had to deliver nearly 12,000 newspapers to various businesses in a 10 hour period. I didn’t have a smartphone, GPS, map or directions. All I had was a list of businesses to deliver to.
The only way I was able to navigate this route was by asking people at every stop along the way. I would stop to deliver newspapers and ask an employee for directions to my next stop. Then I’d go to my next stop, deliver papers and ask someone for directions to the next location. I repeated this method until I completed the route.
My dad always made sure I had a Walmart map in my car.. each page had state maps and locations of Walmarts with auto areas in case you needed car assistance.
Because I got used to using maps from a young age I would explore aimlessly in my car and then bust out the map when I would be hours into a drive just to see where I ended up and how to get home. My parents never knew this and they couldn’t track me 🤣 plus texting and chatting on your cell wasn’t a thing back then – it was for emergencies only
I’ve gone on some major road trips with friends in college when flip phones and ringtones were a thing- we literally used my map skills to travel from the Midwest to LA in our late teens/early twenties.
Maps. It wasn’t difficult.
In 1986, and 1988, I drove from San Diego, Ca to Tampa, Florida and back on my motorcycle. I got lost a couple of times, made it with a map and asking for directions when needed.
I drove from Raleigh to Austin with just a Rand McNally atlas.
Rand McNally baby. I still love a good Atlas.
You planned ahead of time. And used a map. Not to mention there were always guides, et al. Sometimes you had to improvise, but truthfully it wasn’t that bad.
I have three kids in their twenties and I made sure all of them knew how to read a road atlas. I let them navigate when we were on the road.
Maps and pre-planning. It usually meant simpler routes, so it may have taken a bit longer, but it was still pretty easy. There’s loads of signs out there to try and get you where you’re going if you look at them instead of just letting gps tell you where to go
Compass and a coin flip.
Print maps, either fold-out or in book form, were essential.
Shit, not just for road trips. If you were going anywhere you hadn’t been before you had to get out a map and plot your route. You wouldn’t want to rely on the map once you were on the road, especially if driving alone, so you would pick a route using the map and then write out the turns on a piece of paper to refer to as you drove.
Going to a friend’s house for the first time, they would give you a step-by step set of directions. A fundamental life skill was being able to snap off directions to your house, from memory, from each major direction someone might be coming from. We probably drove more miles on average because sometimes you give people the *simpler* route with fewer turns, rather than the shortest one, for convenience and to decrease the odds of a missed turn and getting lost.
I still write out directions before going somewhere unfamiliar, because when I first started using a smart phone, coverage wasn’t yet as complete and there would be dead zones even in fairly developed areas. If you pass a turn in a dead zone, you don’t even know it. I haven’t hit a dead zone in years but the aggravation and confusion still haunts me, so I write my little lists of directions.
Getting off of your planned route by taking a wrong turn or missing a turn, you don’t always want to stop and get out a map, so you sometimes wing it. After a while you develop a bit of an instinct for how to find your way back on the interstate. Also compasses were a good thing to have. My car has a digital compass display built right into the rear view mirror, but when I started driving, it was a $5 stick-on thing you mounted on your dash.
I got out the road atlas, and if I had any maps of particular States I also dug those out. I plotted our course from start to finish I wrote down the roads I wanted to use, which towns or cities I would use as my stopovers. And I always plotted two extra courses in case there was road construction or an accident and I still needed to get around. It was rare for a hotel that I was looking at what I reached sleepover destination to be full but I also made a point to always make sure I stopped in a large city that had multiple hotels or back then I even slept at roadside rest stops. At one point I even had a CB, so if I had any problems there was still a way to get a hold of people. But mostly you just did some research, plotted your course. Made sure you had enough cash, and you winged It.
Some of my trips were from California to Missouri. Maine/Virginia/New Jersey all to Missouri. (each of those last three were separate trips) Mississippi to Missouri. That last one was just a 16-hour drive so I didn’t bother stopping other than to fill up for gas but I still plotted my route.
My parents used to drive us from Idaho to Indiana to see family. That took three or four days. They used atlases and maps to navigate, packed a lot of the food and shopped at grocery stores on the way, and I think most of the sleeping happened in the car with occasional hotel stops.
About 15 years ago I inherited my late great-aunt’s Oldsmobile (1990 Ninety Eight Regency Brougham). In the glove box, there was a stack of AAA TripTiks. She would go to the AAA travel agency and they would print out maps and route directions and make reservations for not only lodging but in some cases dinner at restaurants.
There were trips to Kansas City, Savanna, Tulsa, New York City, New Orleans, and Ann Arbor (to visit another great aunt, a dog show, a cousin’s graduation, another couple dog shows, and my bother’s wedding)
Personally, i always just used my own maps and the Rand McNally road atlas and planned it myself and if really was unfamiliar with an area call ahead for a reservation for a motel.
My dad was a “wing it” type of guy- even on my parents’ honeymoon to Niagara Falls (Mom has said she should have known then what the next 59 years would be like).
AAA triptics
There was a move to Kansas for a short period of time, but I don’t remember the drive.
Paper maps, guide books, and just following road signs.
It kind of blew my eight year old’s mind when I showed her how to look up a town in in my paper atlas of our area, find the route, then write down how to get there and use those instructions to get there.
Hotels and restaurants were a total crap shoot. You either just looked for signs or asked a local. The days of just stopping someone on the street and asking “we are looking for a good place for dinner what do you recommend and where is it” are over.
I did lots of travel pre-internet. No gps, no google, no Mapquest. Just a map and the open road.
AAA membership was a thing. You could get map, plans trips, etc.
I used a map – still do to some degree. A GPS is convenient, but it’s good to be able to figure out your own detour when needed. Food, hotels, & gas were a different story. I did a lot of “I’m tired. I’ll take the next exit and find X.”
I traveled with cash in a addition to a credit card. You could call hotels in advance and make a reservation if you knew where they were. Again AAA could help with that. Hotel chains published travel guides with locations. Some interstate rest areas also had travel guides and sometimes staffed information desks. You could use a pay phone there to make reservations.
You could still wing it and travel. It was just a different skill set. Even back then I had big trip on my bucket list: drive coast to coast with no itinerary. It was doable then & now.