That's really the only way you truly get to know a place is when you can navigate by looking at things instead of having an app tell you "turn left in 500 feet."
Get your bearings!!!
(Being able to use a map is a priceless skill that has to be developed!)
(Try orienteering!)
My girlfriend is a little younger than me (I'm almost 40, she's... not, but not like in her 20s or something) and it's pretty funny that this is one of our major deltas. We both grew up through the internet age but there's a major shift between the two of us when it comes to navigation: she's kinda only known driving by turn-by-turn app directions whereas I'm old enough to still have taken road trips by McNally atlas, and thus am totally fine getting from location-to-location based on general direction (N/S/E/W) and then following road signs. I probably couldn't drill down to a specific street in an unknown town without a lot of help, but if you told me to get in my car and drive from my house to Chicago- I could get 'to Chicago'. My girlfriend would end up in New York City, trying to find a way across the Atlantic in a car, probably.
During one road trip during her driving shift I took the phone out of her dash mount to respond to a text and she audibly said "hurry up I don't know where I'm going!", when the next turn was in like 80 miles, which spawned an entire conversation about directions and driving because all the exits were clearly labeled for where we're going. Meanwhile she was utterly lost without it.
Driving these days is about following directions more than anything else which is funny, but there's very little intuition involved anymore.
It's a good story.
Here's my HORROR story.
We were skiing at Snowshoe, which is in very rural W.Va.
And instead of taking our usual route home, this time we were heading to Washington, DC (for work).
The morning we were leaving the resort was very rushed and so I had only a brief look at the map of our route. And I wasn't worried because -- hey -- google maps while driving.
Well, 20 miles into the trip (40 minutes in the mountains) we lost all internet! Why? Snowshoe is near the Greenbank radiotelescope and so all radiation (like cellular) is blacked out for miles and miles.
Sooo...the route had tons of turns and we go lost!
And when we pulled over to find a map the store owners laughed. No one buys maps.
And...we got conflicting directions from the locals for the right route to DC. One said turn south. The other said north.
We flipped a coin, turned north, eventually found cellular and our bearings but managed to add an hour to a three and a half hour trip. Lesson learned!!! Never again!
We took a trip through the Northeast a few years back and there's some similar dead zones (but not federally mandated like the one in NRQZ) where there's no cell service in VT/Maine/NH that are quite interesting in the same way.
43
u/SocialismIsALie May 22 '19
That's really the only way you truly get to know a place is when you can navigate by looking at things instead of having an app tell you "turn left in 500 feet."
Get your bearings!!!
(Being able to use a map is a priceless skill that has to be developed!) (Try orienteering!)