Last fall, I was browsing in my local bookstore when a title caught my eye: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson. I’ve read a number of Bryson’s travel books and enjoyed them—A Walk In the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, and The Road to Little Dribbling are laugh-out-loud funny—but I had lost track of Bryson in recent years and since The Lost Continent was on a display table, for some reason I thought it was a new (or newish) release and picked it up.

When I finally got around to reading it, what jumped out at me from literally page one was that it was in no way a new or even recent book. What was the giveaway? How Bryson navigated and interacted with the world. Flipping to the copyright page confirmed my suspicion: the book was first published in 1989. That meant, during his travels: No cellphone. No Internet. No GPS. As he drove around the country alone, his sole source of navigation was a printed map, or, occasionally, directions from locals, which were not always reliable. (It’s also amusing how he complains about paying $20 for a motel room. Ha!)

Now, I remember the 1980s (I graduated college in 1989), but looking back it still boggles the mind how we accomplished things back then. Shortly after college, a friend and I embarked on a cross-country road trip and we likewise had none of those Big Three technologies. We, like 1980s Bryson, relied on printed maps. To find places to stay, we relied on highway signage or printed directories of Days Inns or Super 8s we had picked up in motel lobbies—or even of campsites (hey, we were on a budget). We recently reminisced about that trip: how the heck did we manage it? But we did.