Originally Posted by
Machka
+1
The sun and stars will generally tell you what you need to know. Landmarks and a good idea of how fast you generally ride can fill in the rest of the details.
I navigated on bike tours for years with just a map, no computer no compass.
The place I was completely bamboozled was the Netherlands. It is dead flat, it was cloudy, and none of the bike routes were straight they meandered all over the place, which was fun for riding but hard for navigation.
The bike paths are impeccably signed but the signposts sometimes pointed to the next little village or sometimes the next bigger town. So I had to stop and get my map out and see if I could find the name on the map. Sometimes I couldn't. Some days I spent as much time stopped pondering my map as I did riding.
A GPS would have been very useful.