You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?
It was obviously an exaggeration but maps are just an iterative improvement until we landed (for now) GPS enabled devices, in the future we'll maybe have it embedded in our glasses, eyes or brain. I didn't say that we could only start traveling or doing road trips once we invented smartphones.