I am off to Greece and Turkey to reconnect, if briefly, with two of my very favorite places. Friends tell me Athens and Istanbul are very different today than they were when I last visited them in 1977. But no one can convince me that standing high on the Acropolis on a cloudless day, or under the magnificent fifteen-hundred-year-old dome of the Haghia Sophia will not bring the same immense rush of adrenaline they did back then. Unique historic places speak with a resonance that only deepens with age.

Yet no place on earth stands still in the face of time. I learned that poignantly this August on a quick three-day visit to the Adirondacks. After visiting the Great Camp Sagamore, taking a memorable dinner boat tour of Raquette Lake, and visiting the marvelous new Adirondack Museum, I arrived at Lake Placid to find the old Lake Placid Club abandoned and forlorn. I had brought with me pleasant memories of a weekend there years ago and had expected to leave with them fully intact. Instead I left town with those early memories overlain by an ugly image of the great hotel in virtual ruin.

It brought to mind a weekend trip to the Big Apple I made with my father back in the 1960s. He announced proudly that he'd take me to the "best nightclub in town"-a favorite haunt of his in college. Dad even remembered the street address (which impressed me). But when the cab pulled up at the hotspot, it wasn't there! When my father asked a passerby where the nightclub was, the man laughed "Oh, that place closed years ago!" Another memory squashed.

Novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again. In a metaphorical sense he was right, of course, for no place exists in a vacuum. Shelving good old memories and forming new ones-some better, perhaps some worse-is a necessary risk of returning to any favorite place.

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