Traveling with a good map

"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it."
- Steven Wright

This morning while leaving a grocery at the main exit of the parking lot. It turns out a van had been in an accident and flipped over on its side right in the middle of the intersection. Naturally every road feeding into the intersection was closed by the emergency responders. We had to exit the parking lot via a side road that sent us in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go on local town roads.
We made a few wrong turns and a short cut through a neighborhood that didn't work out before we found a way around the accident and back to a major road. And we were not the only "lost" drivers. Others diverted from the accident were making confused turns and illegal turns (like the wrong way on a traffic circle!)
Since we carry maps in the car we didn't have to be lost - we just thought we knew the neighboring town better than we did and never considered consulting our maps. We carry several atlases in the trunk of our car - detailed county maps, state maps for NY, NJ and CT and even a national road map.

Bottom Line
Always travel with road maps. We like the Hagstrom county maps which show every road. We recently tried finding a friend's house in NJ with just the state map and of course it lacked the detail we needed for local roads. We buy maps that are a year old and discounted at book stores - not much changes in a year.
Also useful when you have a destination in mind is one of the many free online mapping services: http://www.map.google.com/, http://www.mapquest.com/ and http://www.maps.yahoo.com/.