Nice vintage find today...

[Sherlock]

Perusing the local flea market today I purchased a 1963 Rand McNally United States & Canada road atlas, an interesting road atlas with a leather-like jacket cover instead of the paper copies of today... The cover is what most interested me... I suppose some of you might remember them from your early driving days...

 

[JPSmit]

nice! (post a picture)

 

[PAUL161]

I still have one, as you described. Replaced it with one with the hard grease pencil pages the truckers used. Of course, that to is out dated. Since GPS and computers, not many uses them anymore. PJ

 

[Deleted member 8987]

Ten years or so ago I drove to a convention in Sacramento. I grabbed my AAA map bag for the trip.
Sitting in the bar one night, one of my customers attending the convention, who lived in the Sacramento area, walked up as I was perusing the maps.
He had no idea what I was looking at...and he grew up there.
1969 AAA maps...NO freeways through Sacramento, part of the route was there now a business loop...most was 99.
Still have those maps, plus some real old ones from 30's and 40's. On our back road trips, I use them to determine where the old highways were before I google map the route.

 

[Sherlock]

I have a small collection of old road maps, dating back to the 1950's for basically all of Canada, I haven't collected very many American road maps for obvious reasons... This road atlas I found today was just different enough to add to the collection... I also have a Canadian road atlas (ca. 1968/72) sponsored by IHC trucks, with advertising for their light duty trucks

Of course the maps are useless for modern day driving but they are fun to look at

 

[Sherlock]

Speaking of re-tracing old highway routes... Last February I did some exploring in southeast Alberta, middle of nowhere... Was planning to drive the old highway route from a city called Brooks to a town called Suffield (there is a modern divided highway nearby), after driving on gravel for awhile one part of the old "highway" had a sign saying the road was not maintained, proceed with caution... Driving a Hyundai Accent I decided not to for good reason, I did make my way around to the other side of that stretch to a lonely piece of Canadian prairie to get this photo... The sign does say "Old Trans Canada Highway", it's a rather crappy road now...

 

[waltesefalcon]

I still use a Rand McNally road atlas, it is about twenty-five years old. I'm odd though, I'd prefer to lay out my own route than have GOS do it for me. I loved maps as a kid and have several older atlases, both road and geographic, dating back to the thirties.

 

[SaxMan]

I have maps from the late 60s and early 70s. I think just as fascinating as the "what's missing" are the routes marked "under construction" and whether they were ever completed. I remember riding the Baltimore Beltway, and they had signs with distances to exits, and the ones that didn't exist were marked "FUTURE". As an 8 year old, I would belly laugh at the thought of being able to take an exit that would lead us to the future. The one marked "FUTURE" eventually became I-795.

I still prefer reading a map to using a GPS. As a kid, I used to love unfolding maps on my floor and looking at them. I can still look at Google Maps on my computer all day...but I pick my routes. In the police department where I volunteer, our Key Maps hadn't been updated to include a highway that opened in 2014, so when our patrol cars with GPS transponders drove on the highway, it looked like they were going 4-wheeling (they've since updated the Key Map, but it was fun to watch the cars driving over supposedly "green" spaces)

 

[Tiger]

Perusing the local flea market today I purchased a 1963 Rand McNally United States & Canada road atlas, an interesting road atlas with a leather-like jacket cover instead of the paper copies of today... The cover is what most interested me... I suppose some of you might remember them from your early driving days...

Great find!!!!

I love maps/atlas, the older, the better. I once found a six-volume late-50's London Times atlas set, each the size of an end table, for $20; a favorite in my book collection but, unlike your find, I doubt I'll be actually going to most of the places shown.

 

[Sherlock]

I still use a Rand McNally road atlas, it is about twenty-five years old. I'm odd though, I'd prefer to lay out my own route than have GOS do it for me. I loved maps as a kid and have several older atlases, both road and geographic, dating back to the thirties.

I'm not a GPS kind of person, I much prefer a paper road map or atlas, I find a paper map gives me more perspective of everything... I don't navigate with a vintage road atlas anymore, but when wandering the countryside around western Canada I use a Back Roads Atlas, which shows all the back roads you don't see on the normal map, even if it leads to a gravel road or two... All the better to find a great photo opportunity...

Like a Czech Aero L-29 Delfin training jet:

Or the little boat on the prairie:

All random finds from wandering on back roads...