Picked a paper map over GPS for a drive through rural Vermont last Sunday and didnt get lost once

I had to get from Burlington to some tiny town near the New Hampshire border called Stannard to visit my cousin. My phones GPS kept trying to route me onto backroads that looked like dirt paths on the satellite view. So I grabbed an old AAA paper map I had stashed in my glovebox from like 2018. Took me maybe 2 minutes to find the right route on the map, wrote the turns on a sticky note, and stuck it to my dash. The drive took 2 hours and 15 minutes exactly what the map said. No recalculating, no battery drain, no signal drop in the mountains. The GPS would have been yelling at me every time I passed a gas station. Has anyone else just ditched their phone for a paper map on a trip and had it work out smoother?

2 comments

2 Comments

grace5652d ago

Read somewhere that using a map keeps your brain sharper than GPS because you're actually building a mental picture of the area. Sounds like you proved that point on your Vermont trip.

the_mia2d ago

lol "building a mental picture" is real. The wild part nobody talks about is how reading a map actually changes your sense of time. With GPS you just hear "turn in 0.3 miles" and your brain stops paying attention. But with a paper map you're constantly looking at the scale and guessing how long it'll actually take to get from one tiny road to the next. That mental math keeps your brain engaged way more than just following a blue line. Plus you notice landmarks way better and start understanding why the roads twist the way they do instead of just following directions blindly.