You know that thing about "The more things change"? Well, sometimes they don't actually stay the same.

This weekend, Julia was invited to play at the house of a friend who used to go to her school, but has since moved to another town. I was given fairly easy direction to the girl's grandmother's house this morning; the father and Julia's friend met us there, and we followed them to their house so I would know where to go pick her up at the end of the day.

Robin took notes on the route as we went, and we probably could have retraced it if we had needed to, but once we were there, they gave me directions to get home a different way that was actually more direct and fairly simple.

That route took me past a well-known restaurant I've eaten at a number of times, but not for at least 10 years (and never driving myself), then past another place where Robin and Julia had a school graduation ceremony once, and the place where Robin used to take swimming lessons (the lessons were through the school, and I had only ever gone there once, for an end-of-year thing).

The road I was on was meant to take us all the way down to the town of Barva, as long as I kept on it through a variety of twists and turns. I did so, recognizing things here and there, until I came to one of those places where a two-way road turns into a one-way road, and I had to turn right. I took an immediate left as the most logical way to continue in the same general direction, but then I wondered if maybe I was meant to keep going in the new direction. I was pretty sure I was nearly all the way down to Barva, so after a few blocks I pulled up alongside a woman pushing a stroller and asked if I was headed the right way to get to Barva.

Heh. Yeah. I was in Barva.

I was picturing coming in from the north, and there's a pretty distinctive intersection-y bit to the north there that I never came to--possibly because I was entering town from the completely unremarkable west. The woman told me which way to go to get to where I was ultimately headed (out the other side of town to the Heredia road) and by the time I got myself oriented I realized that when I stopped to ask I couldn't have been more than four blocks from the house we lived in for five years.

In my defense, that was 10 years ago and the town has changed a lot since then.

No, really.