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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I can understand getting turned around and not wanting to blithely drive Southward on a random Kentucky highway using one's compass. Using that method OP could have potentially drifted away from the interstate they were trying to get back on.

What I'm saying is that a) 90s-era OP would definitely have been using the interstate and b) if they drove more than 30 minutes off the interstate then they ignored so much data and common sense that it's unlikely tech would have helped them here. (E.g., if you want Iphone directions to L.A. but it gives you Louisiana, you still have to interpret the data the phone is giving you to notice you're not going to the correct destination.)

> i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west

Your compass would be telling you you were going west well before you got to Key West. :-)

Did people really carry a compass? (and did it even work inside a car? I think you could get one to stick on the mirror.)

It wasn’t uncommon for cars to have a compass built in.

They definitely work inside cars! And you could get cool dashboard mounted ball ones.

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