All those comedians making up sketches about lost husbands refusing to ask for help weren't basing that on some kind of reality...

If somebody who was from my state pulled up and asked me for directions now I'd treat them with a bit of suspicion, unless they were obviously old and didn't have a handle on technology.

Of course it also depends on where you are touring, try standing at a minor intersection in Japan or China and matching up the symbols on your map to to ones on the signs, yep, you can do it eventually, but hey, why ignore another source of information just because they didn't do that in the old days.