> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

As someone who graduated high school in the early 80s, I also was puzzled by this. Driving from Michigan to Florida wouldn't typically involve leaving major interstates for local roads in rural Kentucky. But if for some reason that was your desired route, you'd plan for it, especially if it was to be in the middle of the night.

Unlike perhaps the 1950s, paper maps and road signage in the 90s were quite good but more importantly, people knew how to use them because that was how the world worked. This struck me as more of a "I was so young/dumb/sleep-deprived/high (pick any two) I did something unbelievably stupid and met with the expected consequences."

It sounds more like OP left on a multi-day, cross-country road trip with only a couple free multi-state maps, which show such a large area they contain no local detail beyond major cities and interstates. If so, leaving the interstate would be foolhardy. Even if you see a single black line on the map connecting two interstates, people in the 90s would not take that 'shortcut' if it was many miles across an unfamiliar rural area, especially in the middle of the night. Because on local roads there will be little road lighting and much less signage AND you don't have a map showing any of the cross roads, small jags or local topology. Miss one road sign in the dark and you're screwed. So, yeah, expected result.

One of the downsides I see in mobile phone natives like my teenager is not only a lack of basic navigation and way-finding skills but also a lack of broad situational awareness. The sense of always being connected gives them a sense of security without an appreciation of what can happen when more than one thing goes wrong. So I've tried to teach you are never more than "three mistakes (or failures) away from bad things potentially happening."

> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

Right. In the early days of Etak, the company that invented car navigation systems, I got a tour from Stan Honey. Honey remarked that they originally displayed the map with north at the top, and a car arrow that rotated with the direction the vehicle was facing, like a compass. Honey is into sailing, and sailors do not rotate maps as the ship turns. But they discovered that about 10% of the population cannot cope with a map that always has north at the top. So they had to make the map rotate. That became standard in GPS displays.

Look, on a Cub Scout camping trip in 1987, my father the Scoutmaster drove two hours in the wrong direction on I-80 in Pennsylvania, trying to get home to New York. He had a caravan of about 5 or 6 cars following. They all communicated with CB radios. Nobody noticed until they got to the Ohio border.

> Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

This reads like Reddit-style "debunk" culture to me.

Improbable things happen. They happen often, because even if the individual improbable thing is itself improbable, the sum total probability of improbable events is high enough that some improbable event happens to all of us with regularity.

Yes, people actually used to get lost. Take a wrong turn, lose your bearings, and you're on some dust road in a corn field. Car GPS did not meaningfully exist. Many people (then, as now) can barely read a map. Highway signage can be busy and confusing. People are young and inexperienced and tired.

Literally any single person who drove before the smartphone era will be able to recount a story to you of getting lost at least once.

> This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

Note how this sort of thing is not actually debunking anything in the article, OP said nothing about opioids or the shirtless man's motivation. All we know is that (a) OP awoke in a car in an unfamiliar place, (b) a shirtless stranger hovered over OP, (c) OP found this disconcerting. It's such a tell-tale sign of Reddit-style debunk culture to "fact check" recounts by inventing details, wildly hypothesising, and then "fact checking" their own wild hypotheses against a Wikipedia-level understanding of the situation.

It profoundly annoys me to see such a pedestrian response to an interesting and thoughtful piece. It adds nothing. It actively detracts, in that people with interesting things to share equivocate over doing so, because they cannot be bothered dealing with this lowly form of engagement. And so we get a sea of Redditors and their worthless "well akshually"s drowning out the actual human experiences that are actually worth reading.

I can't speak to that specific example, because I'm unfamiliar with the US highway system, but plenty of people got lost in the bad old days. At the very least, if you missed a turnoff, you would have to re-anchor yourself on a map. Some people can do that quite easily. Other people cannot do it at all.

Keep in mind, the lost husband buried in maps was a common joke in those days. Also, in the early days of GPS, someone getting lost by following the directions on their phone, was also a common news story. (Presumably these people would still have had situational awareness/direction from using maps in the past.)

As for the shirtless Kentuckian, you're probably right. That said, I've found motorists skittish when I ask them for directions or when checking to see if they need help. I've always chalked that up to being part of car culture.

Also, you have a compass. Just drive South until you reach the Gulf of Mexico, then drive East until you reach the Atlantic ocean, then drive South until you reach where you're going ( it will be daylight by then ).

/edit i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west but it will be daylight long before you run out of road.

I've driven from here in Bucharest to Geneva, Switzerland, about 10 years ago and without using the GPS and I only got lost once, on the return trip around Lago Maggiore because I had chosen to use the "Statale" national road instead of the "Autostrada". It was all on me, and it was a really beautiful place to get "lost" (I ended up on the highway after 45 minutes - an hour of not knowing exactly where I was). I repeated a similar trip about two years later, this time I went all the West to Brittany, France, again, without using the GPS for 99% of the time. The one time when I asked the person sitting on my right to guide me via GPS was when I got lost in the roundabaouts just outside Orleans. Which is to say that one can for sure drive without GPS with almost no issues, no need to sleep in the middle of nowhere at night.