In 1989 I wrote and posted a paper letter to a college friend of ours in Northern England, asking, hey, around [June date I forget] we will be in London, want to meetup? A while later I get a reply letter saying sure, how about we meet at Piccadilly Circus on this date at this time. I posted an affirmative reply and there was no further communication. We were in Arizona at the time.

On the agreed-to date and time we were there, and so was she.

If we were talk about paper maps, it would blow people's minds. If we were to get further in the weeds and describe how we traveled around communist Czechoslovakia w/o a map, only a phrasebook entitled "Travelers Czech", well...

Ah I forgot! We, without being specific about the date, knew that other college friends of ours, originally from Czechoslovakia, had told us they were going to be in their home town of Olomouc. We got the barest help in Prague with my wife's bad German on how to get there by train. Arrived, got a room, and called them up. For the next week they showed us around the country and visited family and friends.

Other than lousy waiters in Prague we had a terrific adventure. Different times.

But you sure had to able to demonstrate you had integrity in your agreements and were open to changes of plans.

What's amusing is that I've tried to do this nowadays, where I make plans with someone a few weeks in advance and then just show up. Only to have them not be there, and when I ask what happened, they said, "oh, I didn't think we were still doing that, you hadn't said anything about it in a while"

Czechia has a very dense public transport network and if you want to walk a very nice network of marked tourist tracks. Not that different form 1989, except for marking an explicit cycling network since then.