A few years ago, we were in Dallas for an educational conference. One evening after my wife’s sessions were concluded we drove our rental car with our friend Steve Coniglio to a Frisco Roughriders baseball game.
The Roughriders are the AA minor league affiliate of the Texas Rangers. I love minor league baseball and have attended games at a dozen ballparks across America.
For anyone who has driven in metropolitan Dallas / Ft. Worth the traffic is challenging but not as challenging as navigating the city.
Thanks to cell phone technology, navigation has become incredibly easy. I’ve used the map feature on Google many times in cities from Philadelphia to Seattle. It’s so easy to rely on technology that you become dependent on it.
We found the Riders Field, the home of the Roughriders easily by following the verbal directions coming from my android cell phone. The game was enjoyable, all minor league games are in my opinion.
The problems came on our return trip to our hotel after the game ended around 10 p.m. As I listened to each turn and highway direction the narrative suddenly went dark. My phone battery died.
I had a 12-volt car charger for the phone, but it was slow.
It was time for a little dead reckoning navigation. Pilots sometimes use it, sailors often did in the 19th and early 20th centuries before the advent of radio, radar, and satellite communication.
I knew our hotel was near a Cabela’s store along Interstate 35. Odd-numbered Interstate highways always run north to south, and Interstate 35 was west of us. Much like the westward migration of the Oregon Trail, you couldn’t miss the Missouri River or the Rocky Mountains if you just kept going west.
So, in the blackness of the Texas night, I drove west until we saw semi-trucks rolling on the interstate ahead of us. Amazingly, we hit the access ramp just a half-mile from our exit.
As a kid, I remember my mom unfolding big highway maps in the shotgun seat of our 1962 Chevy Nova wagon as my dad drove west from Arkansas to Riverton each summer. They had the route down but trips through St. Louis, and Kansas City, with the constant construction and detours you find in big cities, almost always required a road map.
If you’re old enough, you probably remember service stations giving away free road maps. We preferred Texaco maps, but Shell, Chevron, and Skelly stations offered them free as well.
As a high school kid tired of sharing a room with my little sister I converted a chicken coop into a room. After cleaning the coop, filling the walls with newspaper for insulation, and covering them with thin plywood I took the large collection of road maps my parents had collected over the previous decade, made a paste of flour and water, and lined the shed with those road maps.
In our early married years, before the kids arrived, and into the late 90s with the advent of the Internet, we had a Rand McNally road atlas we traveled with on our trips to California, Texas, Missouri, and Minnesota.
Reading a road map is an art, but as a geography nerd, I loved to read maps. I still do.
Does anyone remember their transition from road maps to printed out sheets from Mapquest that detailed trips turn by turn?
It was a great innovation in its day.
Type in your location, add the destination, and print out a few pages to carry with you.
Cell phones have largely replaced Mapquest directions. I had a contract to write descriptions of every campground in Colorado last year and I wrote the step-by-step directions to each campground from the information on Google maps as part of each descriptive piece. It still has its usefulness when you’re planning a trip, but you don’t need to print them out any longer.
Briefly we used a Garmin to navigate and while OnStar came with our last two new vehicles, we let the free trial elapse in favor of the free Google service.
Most of the time we’re in a strange location I just tap the narration button on my phone and say something like, “Directions to the world’s biggest ball of string.”
The cell phone translates the voice request, displays a map with a start button and the drive is ready to begin. Each step of the way the phone tells you directions in advance. “Take the next right… in one thousand feet take the second left…” The technology is so advanced that it indicates traffic accidents, slowdowns, or road construction ahead and suggests alternative routes. Imagine that back in 1967 when you were lost in Kansas City or Detroit?
Sometimes the technology borders on the incredible.
Three years ago, I drew an elk tag for Green Mountain east of Jeffrey City. During bow season, we set up camp, but an advancing winter storm threatened the area, and my son Brian and I decided to head back to Riverton since the weather would sock everything in, including any elk in the area.
It was snowing in heavy sheets, very dark, and the roads from our campsite near the top of Green Mountain were unfamiliar.
Brian found a signal on his cell phone, found directions for Jeffrey City and we started home in his Ford truck.
Google is great, but it doesn’t know the difference between a 12-lane superhighway and a logging road in rural Wyoming.
Google sent us down a couple of logging roads we weren’t familiar with. We spotted a couple of pieces of heavy equipment in the inky night. We’d passed them a few times when scouting the area in the daylight.
We eventually found ourselves in a steep descent down a muddy, rutted logging road heading east. As I did in Dallas that night, we knew the Green Mountain Road was east of us, so we kept going in that direction. We didn’t have any choice since the road was much too narrow between the lodgepole pines to turn around.
We eventually found the main road after a three-foot drop that could have high-centered us. The front tires of the 4×4 pickup grabbed the gravel and we found our way home about an hour later.
An adventure in travel that most city dwellers don’t even want to imagine, but a study in how well Google earth can interact with a cell phone 50 miles from civilization.
Were we dependent on technology? That’s a yes and no answer. Yes, it helped us find the way home, but no it wasn’t a life-threatening situation since we had food, shelter, and water stored in the back of the truck.
Daylight and line of sight navigating would have brought us home just as easily if we waited until dawn.
We should take the technology, but always be aware of where we are when it fails us, and it will eventually.
Until then, just head west, or east, maybe north or south, you’ll eventually find civilization. It’s not quite “Second star on the right, and straight on ‘til morning,” but it’s close.