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When I was stationed in Germany, I was at a remote site that didn't have a nearby military base, so even as a single/no dependents soldier, I got to live off-base and rented an apartment in a local village.
My boyfriend of the time was stationed almost an hour's drive away. I had a car (since again, remote location, I needed one), and he didn't (he was stationed in a more heavily populated area with a lot of public transport), I would drive down to see him. I did it so often I probably could have made that drive in my sleep.
I just input the name of my village and the name of the place he was stationed, just for fun.....and I don't recognize the route the Googlemaps provided. Now, to be fair, at the time we were there, they were building/extending several of the autobahns in the area, so it may just simply be that the route I drove back in the 90s has long since ceased to be the way to get between the two.
I tried to figure out which way I went by town names on the map that I might have passed--some I remembered clearly, others, I didn't. And some of the town names that I recognized had me scratching my head for a minute, because it would have made no sense for me to pass through them....and then I remembered that sometimes I would take a long, meandering route just for the sake of doing it, so looking back almost 30 years later, I've undoubtedly muddled my memory since I didn't always go the direct way.
But I found myself wishing I could make that drive again. There was just something about driving through a quiet hilly German countryside late in the summer evenings.....
its interesting ...but you are seeing things out of a different set of eyes...
I ran into my sixth grade teacher at the golf club I go to......and wow..that took me back to six grade and yes, some memories...….but the more I talked to him...the more he is a golfing buddy than my old favorite 6th grade teacher.
he asked me ---not to ask him if he remembers me he said he had over 4k kids....as a teacher..
I told him I was someone else and he remembered me....lol
Yes, I visit old places, alone. Athletic fields I trained on 20 years ago. Buildings I used to work at. It’s a kind of spiritual archeology for me. Sometimes I go out at night and retrace my old newspaper route—those were the glory days!
I really try not to. It gives me an unpleasant sensation. I guess that's nostalgia. But it feels creepily similar to mild grief, and I just don't like that feeling. I like to look forward.
I feel that way about music too. I love old music that was made before I was born. Can't get enough of it--Curtis Mayfield, Hank Williams, all of it. But music that evoked a certain feeling in me when I was in my twenties, like Radiohead? I can't listen to it.
Being retired, I can now travel leisurely. And on a recent RV trip I decided to visit my old neighborhood to see what had changed.
The neighborhood was so bad you could film a post-apocalyptic movie on the streets. I didn't stop the truck or get out -- or even take pictures. The groups of sidewalk pharmacists in their Young Felon of Tomorrow outfits glared so intently as I drove past, that I assumed they might go ballistic (literally) if they thought they were being filmed.
I'd never "visited the past" before, and won't return now. Just glad I got out a long time ago.
When I visited (in person, not online) my childhood small town, for a long time it looked mostly as I remembered it. From the late 1980s through the 1990s and 2000s, it felt pretty much like a small town, just more houses and people but nothing dramatically different. But between 2007 and 2017, it slipped over the edge from small company town turned commuter town, into what immediately struck me as nothing but a far-flung bedroom suburb for metro Boston and, probably, Providence.
Our little town held childhood wonders such as trying to fish in “the wading river,” swimming every summer day, bicycling all over with no adult supervision, playing squareball every summer morning, going barefoot as default till our soles were thick and tough, running toward the jingle of the ice cream truck that plied the neighborhoods, raking and jumping into piles of autumn leaves before burning them, and so many more classic New England scenes that it now seems like an ancient dream.
That 2017 visit was the only one that I did not enjoy even one bit of. I do not plan on returning.
Also, another town which I had lived in as an adult, right at its border with another sleepy town well outside of the Boston metro hullabaloo, I did look at via online photo maps. Total shock. Instead of the quaint pre-Revolutionary War house with one other residential building next to it and a veterinarian’s office on the other side, the entire area had become developed in an extremely ugly manner. From reading online posts, the town itself changed from being a separate very small city that was safe and boringly “family oriented” (though they never, ever used that as a marketing term) to a place of last resort for druggies and other scumbags pushed out of the Boston area by high COL. It would be heartbreaking to see that unacknowledged historical house (we did see one dated sketch of it in a local history book) now, unappreciated as its chopped-into-slum-apartments insult of a reincarnation.
I sure do, OP! I love to make virtual visits my hometown (I'm not able to get their often), trolling real estate sites for homes that belonged to ancestors, investigating the regions history, reading the city newspaper to keep up with what's happening, and following local college sports. My family thinks I'm crazy, but I love that kind of stuff. It doesn't make me sad at all. I'm perfectly happy where I am now and do not plan to go back, but I'm just a curious person that way.
I'm 36, and I'm terribly nostalgic about just about everything. I live in CO, and have for the last 13 years. I grew up in Southern CA (left there at age 20), with summers in Western WA as a child/teen.
My neighborhood back in CA is what most would consider to be a terrible barrio (then, and now). In adulthood, I continued to visit my next door neighbors from my childhood in the same house the patriarch purchased new in 1962. We lived next door to them from 1986-1996, and they were all like family to us well into my adulthood. Sadly, both the mother and father of the household passed away in the last couple of years. The neighborhood is still "home" to me, and though the elementary school across the street (I attended K-3) is completely unrecognizable, and though the hilly backdrop has been mined beyond recognition, the neighborhood still feels very much as it did when I was a kid, and I visit nearly every trip back.
I worked at a Denny's just outside my neighborhood from 1998-2004. My mother also worked there from the time it opened in 1992 until 2001. I went back in 2015 with my wife/kids, and my brother. It was a horrible experience. The remodel was poorly done, the service was awful, and there was nobody left that I knew. That visit closed the book on that, and that day I declared that I never have to go back.
I was back in CA this past January. I had not been back by my second elementary school (grades 4-6), and my first middle school (grade 7, first month of 8th) since I last attended them. We had gotten a bite to eat and gone bowling nearby, so I said why the heck not? I followed the same route my school buses followed *by memory* and found the elementary school to be completely unrecognizable, and the middle school to look just the same as it did when I attended. It felt good to see them again.
My 91 year old grandmother still lives in the home her and my grandfather purchased new back in 1986. I make it a point to visit every time I'm back in the Seattle area, it is so great to be able to continue to visit a place that is also "home".
An anecdote re: the neighborhood, however:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Count David
Back in 2011, I went to take my wife to this cool road outside of Everett, where I used to ride my bike to Snohomish as a boy (mid 1990's).
It was so cool, all downhill, in a complete canopy of trees all the way down to the valley floor and the farms.
Occasionally, we'll go by other homes/apartments we've lived in here in the Denver area. Doing so mostly points me to the progress we've made since moving here.
What's funny about all of this to me is my brother. He is two years younger than me, lived in the same homes I did, attended the same schools I did (except for one), and still lives in the area we grew up in. So seeing all of this same stuff/people/places is every day life for him, and probably doesn't affect him in any way at all. In some ways I'm envious of that, but in many ways I am not.
There is a house in a beautiful neighborhood in Lacey, WA, where I lived until late 2011, and Google maps still shows my ex husband's car parked in the driveway.
I have looked at one of the houses where I lived as a child. A prior owner had installed a ridiculous piece of playground equipment in the yard, a fiberglass duck on a big spring, you sat on it and it was supposed to rock back and forth. But the spring had rusted badly, and it made a horrific metal groaning and squealing if you tried. My parents tried to remove it, but they'd sunk it into concrete they poured in the hole in the ground, it was anchored solidly and removal was beyond our abilities. Well, over the years, someone managed to do it because it's gone now.
I was most surprised by Cincinnati, though. I lived there in the late 1990s as a young barely-adult teenager, and I used to adventure into what was then apparently the most dangerous neighborhood in the country! I had no idea at the time, though I knew it was rough. Anyways, not only are some of my favorite old haunts gone, like Angst Coffee Shop, and Sudsy Malone's Rock & Roll Laundry & Bar... But now apparently gentrification has taken over and Over The Rhine is actually a nice neighborhood and draws tourists to peruse its businesses on foot... It's amazing how much a place can change in a couple of decades.
Just for kicks, I put my former homes on my Redfin alerts (search for the addy, then "save search," then allow notifications) so I will always know when it comes up for sale, for how much, and when it sells, and for how much.
Just a weird thing, but because home values in that part of the world climb so high and so fast, it fills me with "Wow!"
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and found the elementary school to be completely unrecognizable, and the middle school to look just the same as it did when I attended. It felt good to see them again.
