You would have died trying to follow in my footsteps on my route. It was a killer.
I will say though that I bet a good majority of todays drivers would go absolutely insane trying to navigate a rural route without the help of a cell phone or GPS or any other electronics---all while driving a POS straight stick. For the first 5 or 10 years I worked the only addresses that were on the rural route packages were like Joe Blow-- RR3. It got better when they switched to Joe Blow RR 3 Box 187 (as long as you knew how the mail carrier ran his route). We spent a lot of time barrowing customers phones trying to locate people.