I don't mean to sound arrogant or conceited, but I am blessed with an usually accurate sense of location, route, and destination. I can navigate across large tracts of unfamiliar territory with no maps, paper or electronic and end up where I want to be. Plus, I rarely forget a road or even corners and turns. If I've ridden a road before, I'm not often surprised by a corner (although the only wreck I've had happened one night when a corner I'd ridden several times felt way too fast to me).
I've found places I haven't been to since I was in kindergarten and grade school in the last few years. But I never remember highway numbers or street names. It's the actual physical connections, the angle of the corner, the elevation changes, etc., that give me my bearings.
I have not been everywhere, but I've been a lot of places and when I'm in one place, I can visualize how it connects to the places I've been, whether those are a few miles away or several hundred miles away.
When I "plan" my trips, I use a combination of paper maps, MS Streets and Trips, and that sense of where things are and how they connect. Unless I have a destination and a timetable I need to keep, I try to "fill in the gaps" by taking roads I haven't taken before.
On a trip, I usually plan a rudimentary route in the GPS, but then I'm free to deviate and often do.
