My parents were quite cautious drivers, and they did practically everything very locally, and often eschewed freeways if it were at all possible for their route

My parents were quite cautious drivers, and they did practically everything very locally, and often eschewed freeways if it were at all possible for their routes. My father kept a meticulous log of mileage and gasoline fill-ups in a pocket notebook that stayed in his car's center console. If we filled the tank but didn't update the notes, we'd catch hell for it. Another indispensable auto accessory was the Thomas Guide. We had Thomas Guide maps for every conceivable nook and cranny of our extended metropolitan area, and also for places we nearly never traveled. And I loved these books. They had such layers of meaning in the colors and symbols. You could literally get lost among the pages and learn so much about your local topology, in terms of streets and roads and blocks. So it was nigh-impossible for me to get lost, even as a novice teen driver, when that Thomas Guide was right in a seat pocket. I absolutely never needed to ask directions. I usually planned out trips in advance, especially the unfamiliar locales; it was easy to pinpoint a destination in Thomas Guide and then work towards it. The interesting thing is that I was also a rather local motorist and there were many, many parts of the city where I never learned the streets, because I had no reason to drive there. Contrast that with the place where I live today: we've got an incredibly rigorous grid system with predictable numbering, and so if you show me an arbitrary address, I can tell you exactly what the cross-street and region it's in and give directions, without even glancing at cartographic aids.