> 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."