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Nature is full of clues to help you find your way – if you know where to look. Stuart Heritage lets go of the GPS to learn the art of natural navigation from pioneer Tristan Gooley
[...] How to navigate in a city
Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast.
Find an 'invisible handrail' and use it to remember your bearings. In the countryside, this might be a river. In a city, it could be a main road.
Look at a tree. Do the branches point a certain way? That's probably south. Are the leaves on those branches smaller than the leaves on the opposite side? That's definitely south.
Use the sun. It rises in the east, sets in the west and moves through the southern sky, giving you a very basic compass.
Need to get home? Head against the flow of people at the start of the day or with the flow at the end and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a station.
Source: Ditching the satnav: the lost secrets of natural navigation
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:50AM (4 children)
Nah, doesn't matter if it's in the city or out in the sticks. I can get around Chicago just as well as I can the woods in west Tennessee. If you know a landmark that you can't help but cross going west (cross street, creek, whatever), and you can always tell which direction is west, you may not know where you are but your version of lost can never be more than a temporary one even without assistance.
Now needing specific directions to someplace you've never been, that's another story entirely.
P.S. Yes, I've been all over Chicago. I spent a few weeks doing contract work there. Stayed at one of the guys I worked with's family home in the south-central bit. They gave me some pale blue sneakers so's I wouldn't get killed to death on account of mine apparently being the wrong color for the neighborhood. Fixed the best Mexican food I ever tasted too. Really nice folks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:42AM (2 children)
Try driving in almost any European city on a cloudy day. Because the roads are not laid out on a grid and they are frequently not straight, it's much more difficult to figure out directions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:27AM (1 child)
Doesn't really seem to matter. Virginia and Tennessee ain't exactly known for their gridline roads or lack of sky-obscuring weather either but neither bother me even a little.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:55PM
Yup... anywhere in mountainous terrain does NOT have straight roads... they twist and turn all over the place, constrained by elevation grading.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:51AM
Out at Superstition our landmark is the lights of the plaster plant, but we also have some geographical ones as well.