?

Then I guess you go back to the other place where there was before.

I know this is the Europe board but... I grew up in California and moved east at age 12. A few years ago I had the chance to travel to CA with DH on his business trip. While he was in meetings, I drove the rental car to the old homestead (Navy Housing). GASP!! It was gone! I was just devastated, couldn't refresh any of the old memories. But life went on!

Allisonm: Had a similar experience last year when we returned to the place I was born after many years. My grandmother's house had been remodeled and had a different look to it. I was pleased. This was a different house than the one I knew so well, and the new people who lived in it didn't really live in the old house I remembered.

I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing PalQ was looking for. I suspect he/she meant going somewhere you had looked forward to seeing, and it wasn't at all what you expected, or was a big disappointment. Fortunately, this is not an experience we've had in our travels. We, of course, have liked some places better than others, but all our trips have been rewarding.

Or do you mean -- plan a trip to the quiet, remote solitude of the Cinque Terre (or somewhere like that) and get there to find it jampacked with other tourists, and now overrun with tourist shops and fast food restaurants?

I guess, you grin and bear it and say, "I should have come 10 years ago."

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

Brussels.

And when you GET to "Paradise" that parking lot is full!!!

And a sign saying "for more parking go to Hell".

Would seem that there are a whole lot more parking spaces in Hell than in Paradise.

Pal: I'll bet there are more in Rocamadour!

Well Rocamadour, like Mont St. Michel is car-less i believe so are no parking spots right in town.

Is this sort of like Thomas Wolfe's You can't go home again?

You can't go to paradise again?

And aren't all vacations better as memories anyway? We forget about the delays at the airport, and the snotty (at the time) waiter/sales agent/tour guide is now fun. That battle with intestinal distress now was 'I guess I should learn to read the menu in a foreign language' lesson. The weather was perfect, the sun was shining and everyone smiled. While in reality, it rained constantly and everyone was surly (except for the snotty people).

I guess you find a new "there". There are plenty of them out there.

Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court of a group of pilgrims heading for a holy fountain who hear it has ceased to flow: "now when . . . they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angleworms would probably have done -- turn back and get at something profitable -- no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings."

Some small consolation in company.