my uncle used to do 5 trips to germany a week with no satnav,or a-z…always different cities,and he was tipped and home in time to go and get blocked every night…mind you,he was in a lancaster bomber… 
…and on the topic,a map and a mouth are the basic requirements.you had a bad day,take the kick in the nuts,and stop whinging. nobodys going to give a toss about your driving hours,unless of course your next trip is across the channel■■? 
While driving in Europe with no sat nav i got a sixth sense of where a place was.
Using the smell,not far away from a saw mill or an iron foundary.
Food factories for baking smells.
If loading frozen fish.Follow the fishy smell.
Some loading places it was their head office and the factory is ten miles away up some hills.They would give you a map or draw one.
m1cks:
Maps beat sat nav hands down.
■■■■■■■■. Three weeks ago I had the day from hell. Largely my own fault but I can attribute some of it to SatNav/Map balls upls.
Heading to a Supermarket RDC in West London, bunged it into the company supplied tomtom 71■■. Looked at estimated time, thought that thats tight but do-able and cracked on. Got to within a couple of miles of the site and found that my route in was blocked by a 7.5t limit. Tried to route around it on the satnav and it wouldn’t work.
Then whipped out the old A-Z and truckers atlas and tried to find another way in and I still couldn’t find the location. (Ill grant you that the postcode i was given was wrong, it put the drop on the wrong side of a bridge I assumed the 7.5t limit was for when I looked on the map.) So I followed the sat nav confident that my drop was inside the 7.5t weight limit.
Got there, tipped the load and got out after communing further with the paper based mapping and a bit of Google on the smart phone for good measure. Found that there was a shorter route out to a main road that the one I had taken in so instead of turning left backtrack my route out, I turned right and got clocked by a camera for going through another 7.5t weight limit.
I think I did everything I could, including using mapping which said I was clear. HOWEVER, the tomtom had it right. The big problem with a map, especially in London is that BoJo can slap a weight limit in the day after the mapping company send the artwork to the printers. The same is true of a sat nav but at least you can update a sat nav on the move, mine gets updated every Sunday night as I go into work the night before I start, (I live a fair way from the depot and waking up at 2 in the morning for a four o’clock start and fifteen hour day isn’t my idea of a good way to do business.)
reminds me of the first time I went to scotland 
how was I to know the m1 didn’t go all the way 
Back in the day,snore,I had maps of everywhere and a sat nav used to find the sat nav handy for the last bit,but looking at a map you can recognise industrial areas etc by the road layout or actually have some places marked.Going into the smoke I liked my big az another map that just showed major roads and a sat nav,belt and braces I know but never got lost.That major road map was great I never saw it for sale again.Some addresses are just laughable I had a container collection Mr Johnson London! Some office bod has sat and solemly typed that in to the job without any question.