If so, what really struck you?
Some years ago, '91, I went back to a place where I’d spent a few years as a kid growing up and couldn’t get over how small everything looked; the street, houses and even the “big” rock next to the driveway. And the town in general seemed a little rundown.
Did you have a similar thing happen to you when you went back after being gone for so long? Please tell us about it. Thanks!!
I moved back to where I grew up after being away for about 25 years. I didn’t notice changes in the place as much as the people. I think I expected everyone to look the same and it was disorienting, to see that my old friends had aged so much. 
One thing I did notice was that houses I thought were nice as a kid had deteriorated, or weren’t as nice as I remembered.
And the gravel pit we swam in – I remembered it being much bigger.
How about a virtual one? I went here and typed in the address of my childhood home, clicked the ‘large overhead’ view from the details page and presto — I was peeking down into my old neighborhood. I wandered around the streets I where used to ride my bike, took a ‘walk’ to my grandmother’s house. Got all misty and nostalgic and everything.
It’s amazing how much detail you can actually see and from the bird’s-eye angle. Didn’t look like too much had changed in 40 years, either (except the value of the house, of course).
Two years ago I took a drive to the town where my late grandmother lived and where I spent a lot of summers growing up. I hadn’t been there for maybe 10 years. A lot was the same and it was like being in the wayback machine. But all the little tiny changes bothered me. Just small things like the Tim Hortons that didn’t used to be there or the condo that went up. Oh, you really can’t go home again. It made me very wistful. The next door neighbours had a funny tree with a branch that looped out at the perfect angle for sitting on and that branch was gone and it made me so sad. In the end I was glad I went though. It was a pleasant way to be sad. I do miss my Grandma.
When my (then-future) wife first visited me in Canada, we rented a car and went to the little town where I grew up. I showed her all over the place. My old house, the neighbors’ houses I hadn’t seen in 20 years. We went for a walk around the outside of the public school I attended. I showed her the names carved into the brick from 1880. We sat on the swings I swung on as a kid.
It was much the same as it was, and also quite different. My old house looked so small. In fact, the whole place looked smaller. The field across the street that went up to the railroad tracks was now occupied by a donut shop and its parking lot. The grain elevator at the opposite end of my street had been dismantled years earlier, and the view now is much like it was when we first moved there in the sixties, when there was no grain elevator at the end of the street. Anyway, I didn’t know anyone there anymore. It had ceased to be home a long time ago. But we went there, and I guess I paid my last respects to the place. I don’t expect to be going back. It was primarily to give my wife a glimpse of where my roots lie.
When my grandmother (Dad’s side) died back in the 80’s, dad and I took a road trip cross country to her house so he could settle affairs. While we were there, I suggested we drive by the old house mom and dad lived in when I was born. I was in my early 30’s when we took the trip.
When we were there, I suggested going by the old house I lived in till I was five. First house mom and dad ever bought. We went by and I convinced the old man to stop. I went and knocked on the door, and a lady answered. I said I was a child here in the early 60’s, and was here with my dad.
The lady was really cool and invited us in. My dad freaked out, looking at things he had remodeled and such. The best part was the lady came up with a picture she had found in the attic showing my dad next to a boat he was building in front of the garage in the early 60’s, said she always wondered about it.
She gave him the pic. Pretty cool sentimental thing.
Pardon the redundancy, I was caught up a bit in the moment when I wrote that.
benny73 thanks for the OP, it brought back some good memories. 
Yeah, but not sentimental in the way a normal sentimental journey would be. I spent my junior year in Vienna, Austria. This was a life-changing event from me–it caused me to see the US with new and different eyes, and made me love living abroad–not b/c I hated the US, but because I found it exciting to put myself in a foreign atmosphere that was challenging to navigate and perhaps a little outside of my comfort zone. So when I left Vienna to return to the US, not knowing if I would ever spend significant time abroad again, it was a melancholy time. Years later, after I had moved to Beirut, I returned to Vienna with my wife, and looked up some of my old haunts–my old dorm, the pub next door where I went drinking with my friends, etc. It was returning to somewhere that meant something important to me–a place that represented an awakening in me, corny though that sounds.
I grew up in a town of about 17,000 people which now has over 165,613 people. The last time I was there, I had difficulty finding where I used to live, and my highschool had been moved to who knows where.
Wow, either you are a hundred years old, or the old hometown grew really fast.
JK, that must have been a culture shock kind of thing.
I realized how old I was the first time that the male 9th graders smoking outside of Jesuitas looked like 7th graders. After recovering from the realization, I doddered back to college…
The first house I remember was one of two isolated towers outside of town. It didn’t get connected to the rest of town until the new university campus was built; Lilbro was one of the new uni’s first students but he was out of town when he had to sign up for classes, so I signed up for him. Seeing the construction work along the road that used to be so totally isolated, the spanking shiny new buildings on what used to be an empty grass field and the bit of un-mowed, un-gardened, daisy-covered field that had been left made me stop and take a couple deep breaths before I could go on.
Two summers ago, after a trip to Disney with the extended family, I spent a couple of hours locating the nearby home where I’d lived from age six to seven. It was in the little town of DeLand and while I didn’t have an address, I did know the name of a nearby lake. Looking at the map I was able to put us close and as soon as we turned on the right road I was immediately overcome with a sense of nostalgia. It had been fourty years and soooo much had changed but everything just seemed kinda right. Gone were the orange and tangerine orchards but, thankfully, it still was just a quiet, remote, somewhat overgrown little street.
Pulling into the same circular driveway, this time in a car with my family instead of on a Schwinn with a bananna seat, everything came rushing back; my puppy, my swingset, filling the heating fuel tank with rocks, elementary school, birthday parties, the hurricane, windows you’d open with a crank, walking through the yard with my dad and pulling our breakfast from the trees every morning.
The family came out, were so pleasant and curious and we were actually still able to make a connection of people we knew to who was there now. Best though was walking with my six year old and telling her “dad stories” of things I’d done and felt right there when I was just her age.
It was a day I’ll never forget.
Every time I go back to my parent’s house and my hometown, where I spent the first 18 years of my life. Also when I go back to the campus of my alma mater, which is in the same city where I live now. I’m only 25, I can’t imagine how these places will continue to strike me with nostalgia as I age.
I lived in Levittown, Long Island from age 8 to 14.
When I turned 18, I went back for a visit.
It had only been 4 years and the old neighborhood was pretty much the same.
Compared to Denver, it did seem a bit smaller scale, though Denver, back in those days, was not the big city it is now.
I really wanted to see our old house, that’s where the memories really were.
I obtained permission to walk around in our old house, and I went downstairs to the basement and peeked inside the wall of a small closet.
Yup, the pterodactyls and tyrannosaurus rexes that my brother and I had drawn were still there.
I do this several times a year. I grew up an hour’s drive from my present home and have much painful baggage from childhood. For some reason I feel as if the answer to life’s agonizing questions lie in the hills where I played. Many things are still as I remember them, though often smaller. Some outdoor areas are more intriguing and beautiful than I remembered, and I’m surprised by how much I didn’t notice then. Nobody I knew is still there.
When the public housing product my family lived until till I was five was scheduled for demolition, I went back.
I moved away from my home town in Montana when I was 12. I went back when I was 18. I had heard that the people who had bought our old house had ruined it. I had no idea how badly until I drove up. Their changes didn’t make any sense.
My house was essentially in a park. All the backwards of the houses on the block faced the park and only each individual fence at the property line separated them from the park. We had a beautiful back yard. Landscaped with multiple levels, stone paths throughout, a rock garden, a regular garden where we used to grow carrots and corn, small trees and shrubs, a patio off the back door, and a play house. This was a beautiful yard that required little actual mainteance (besides the garden).
When I came back, they had flattened everything. The backyard was grass. All grass and they didn’t even have a fence and there appeared to be intention of putting one in. This bugged me more than just that they had destroyed the landscaping that my parents had put so much effort into…it struck me as just plain dangerous. It meant anyone in the park could literally walk right to your back door with no barrier.
Our house was always an ‘interesting’ color choice of golden yellow with brown trim, but their white with bright green trim struck me as disgusting.
The park itself was pretty similar, still had the metal swings and swing horses, the wooden play equipment they put in in the late 80s was heavily scratched up and graffitied.
The most important thing, the Burgermaster three blocks away, still had the most delcious mushroom burgers (cream of mushroom soup with cheese melted in it poured over a burger) ever.