Or maybe you can go to the place that used to be home - and find out that it isn't any more.
Since traveling to New York would be unrewarding (My entire family has either moved or died off) I just spent a few minutes 'visiting' courtesy of Google maps.
My childhood dwelling is an unoccupied grassy place in an area that is obviously zoned light industrial. All of the places where I first noticed steel wheels on steel rail are now totally devoid of trolley tracks and overhead rapid transit structures.
The apartment building where I survived adolescence is still standing, but almost everything around it has changed - and I don't see the changes as improvements. High-rises where there used to be open spaces, town houses where there used to be a beautiful park devoted to Native American dwellings and artifacts, pedestrian bridges that used to be traffic signal protected level crossings across a boulevard that has become an expressway, residences where my school's campus used to be...
The Pelham Bay elevated tracks along Westchester Avenue are still there - but the present stations and trains sure don't look like the ones I remember.
Oh, I could go and see the same things with my own eyes. I doubt that it would be worth the bother.
Just to prove that I'm an equal-opportunity nostalgist, I did the same thing to the places in Japan that were closest to my heart, with equally unsatisfactory results.
I can go back to the same map coordinates - but home isn't there any more.
Chuck
On my last trip to New Jersey, I got to visit two of my teenage haunts, both of which frankly look a heck of a lot better today than they did in the 1970s. In fact, Hoboken was a real slum back then. I remember my neighbor asking my dad if he wanted to go in with him 50/50 on some apartment buildings in Hoboken and my dad telling our neighbor no, it was too risky. Today, Hoboken's an upscale gem. The clock tower in this shot is new, a replica of the original. The light rail train is also new... I must have passed through this station 1,000 times in my youth.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=307309
And even more times, I visited this little station in Oradell, which didn't have the carriageway back then. This was a restoration done in the last ten years or so, to bring the station back to its original appearance. You might say this station is where I became a railfan.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=307315
Much as they say you can't go home again, and it's all crap now... it was nice to see these things still there... sure, it would have been even more fun to see some Erie Lackawanna E8s and DL&W MUs, but you can't have everything.
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