Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Folks who moved away from where they were raised .

I go back - it’s only 100 miles. No family there anymore and I rarely see any faces I recognize these days. I left 35 years ago.

I was there last Saturday to pick up a gun I purchased online from a shop there. Had a beer at the bar & grill on Main St, went across the river to patronize the country store that re-opened this year with new owners after a devastating flood a few years ago and bought a sandwich from a bbq restaurant on my way out of town. Saw a lot of deer hunters in town on Saturday night, but did not recognize anyone.

A few days later I was speaking with a good friend on the phone. He lives about 4 hours away. He says “I was in town this weekend, I wish I would have known.” Well, crap. Me too.

The house I grew up in is the crazy cat lady’s house now. a classmate who on the ambulance crew told me they had a call there and the smell is unbearable. Driving by, it appears that the drapes that my mother put up on the living room window in the 70’s are still there - minus the bottom 10 inches or so that the cats have clawed away. It’s a damn shame, it is an extremely well built home.

Most of my small family have passed on , I have some cousins I'm not close to . Just my one year older brother Tim we're the last in line . Neither of us have children , we ponder who to give the old family pictures to .
Yes you can go home - it's not exactly like it was when you were a kid - but fun to see anyway .

So true, sad but true. For me to go home would require mom multitasking while raising 5 children, my grandpa drinking warm beer from his toolbox in the garage that he hid from grandma and my younger brother asking me to help him sight in his pellet gun.

They’re all gone now so instead of crying over that which I can never get back my sweetheart and I are giving our children a home and childhood that they’ll remember fondly and that they too will miss someday.

I think about the good old days often but then I only need to look around me at the real blessings in my life. I never want to forget that I’m still a part of the good old days.

There was a spruce at the end of our street outside of Debbie’s 2nd floor bedroom window, just tall enough where a group of guys could climb it and look in. So when bored and drunk we would occasionally partake. We didn’t have the internet back then.

Debbie was hot and blonde and rode our same high school bus and never bothered to draw the curtains much. I think the most we ever saw was her in her bra, pretty sure she liked the attention.

I went back to the old neighborhood a few years back and that tree is friggin’ huge now. That’s how I know I’m old 🙂

Debbie? My cousin ran into her a couple of years back and she told him I could climb her tree anytime. I was surprised she even remembered my name. Ya never know the effect you had on people.

Born in CO in 63. Raised there. Left in the 80s to join the USN. Spent 25 years on active duty. Tried to return to CO and found the CO of my youth was extinct, replaced by a copy of CA. Refuse to live in CA or anyplace like it. Took Davy Crockett's advise and went to TX. Gonna stay right here!

I haven't been back in about 6 years. My people settled a big chunk of the county in western Kentucky where I grew up.

Then Alben Barkley was chosen to be Truman's Veep and had a big federal atomic energy plant built down there. After that, a bunch of peasants moved in to work at the place and fugged it all up.

By the time my generation came along there was all kinds of "outsiders" running around.

Still, I'm related in one way or another to a *lot* of people who live down there.

I'm going back one more time to roam the cemeteries and pay my respects to the old ones. There's not many of us left who understand their significance to the region.

I'm only about 30 miles away from the town where I spent the first 40 years of my life, but it has changed so drastically in the last 20 years that I avoid returning. The dairy farms are gone. The fields I used to till have since developed a bumper crop of McMansions. Many of the neighbors I cared so much about have passed, replaced with upscale city dwellers who neither embrace nor understand what small town living is supposed to be about. I cling to the memories of a wonderful place that no longer exists.

The old home place, circa: 1890s. West McCracken county Kentucky. My people when it was theirs.

I am disappointed in myself that I didn't stop in and visit with many of the older people I knew as a lad - too busy having a good time partying .
By the time I quit all that most of the older folks had passed away . Many treated me real well - I'd see them in their yard and drive right on by .

Family moved when I was 13. Best thing my parents ever did for us. No desire to go back.

Joe South’s song, “Don’t it make you wanna go home “ is a good one.

U is 1 wild & crazy guy............

I haven't been back to central Texas since 2003 when I graduated high school. Buddies always come up here to Alaska to fish/hunt on visits.....say its the same brown dirt hole that it was when I left.

i still own my grandparents house in prescott, well over 100 years old. mostly used by my daughter now.
prescott is still prescott but overrun by californicators. property increases have pushed me into the seven figures, but i would rather have
the area prior to the invasion.

My sister and BIL still live there so I'm usually at their place during deer season. HS reunion every five years now that we are all in our sixties.

The house that I was raised in for most of my life was sold nine years ago. I don't go by there anymore.

My BIL used to ask me when I was moving back (thinking retirement) and I tell him never. He said something about my wife not wanting to live there but I told him it was mainly me. I don't want to live somewhere with a lot of people that know me and my family and people get in my business.

It's pretty infrequent but I don't make a point of going by my parent's house or anything.

Unless I have my kids with me. They usually like hearing young 'flave stories. LOL

Bingo[/quote

This, I left Montana at 17 to join the Navy. Went home when I got out and two weeks later I moved to Washington state. Never wanted to move back to that dead end town. The west has been very good for me.

Been gone for 44 years and when i go back it is interesting to see what changes have been made.

Some not for the better.

The place has grown up a lot with the casinos coming in.

Used to be a tourist economy.

But the fishing is still great.

I'm sitting in the house I grew up in.

Got on a ship at age 5,...we been Americans ever since. I grew up in a house across the road from the cemetery where he's buried,.....walked by it thousands of times,...never really knew the significance of it until I was an old man.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11640337/william-boase-trewolla