Before GPS, AAA made your route by hand

A closer look

Decades before a soothing AI voice commanded you to make a legal U-turn, the great American road trip was powered by a spiral-bound stack of glorified index cards. Introduced by AAA, the TripTik was a bespoke travel routing system where an agent literally sat down with a highlighter and built a custom flipbook for your specific drive. They stamped construction zones by hand and mapped out every Howard Johnson's along the way. It was an insanely labor-intensive logistical masterpiece that conditioned an entire generation of boomers to blindly trust a narrow strip of paper while hurtling down Route 66 at 70 miles per hour.