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I was working with a Rand McNally Atlas type map that I had purchased a month or so earlier when I was on the East Coast. Every state is on a separate page by itself. The concept of "Gee one book has all of the states" is cool, but it is unfortunate in a few different aspects:
1) Every state is printed at a different scale to fit the page so the inch I drove in Maryland represents 33% fewer miles in New Jersey. This creates a problem if you are trying to figure time from A to B on the fly, as: "I traveled two inches in about 20 minutes in Maryland, this exit in I want to take in New Jersey is about 2 inches, so in about 20 minutes I'll start looking for it." The plus side to that is you discover parts of a place you hadn't intended.
2) The resolution (general street detail) is necessarily low, so when planning routes or side-routes you might not realize that you can get to point A to point C without passing through point B there are lots of lovely routes to take that can be much shorter if (even when driven at half the speed) if you only knew they existed.
This specific episode resulted from a low-resolution map. I had no idea what the layout of Fayetteville was, no wonder I got lost!
/-end digression | 
