Alright, this blows me away.
I wanted to look up the place where we lived in Muncie, Indiana, in the last 1960s - the first house my parents bought. There's something on Google Maps I haven't checked out before, Street View, so I try it.
And there it is, our old neighborhood. As if I were standing on the street. I turn east, walk down the street a bit, and there's our old place.
Amazingly, the giant oak tree on the east side of the yard is still there. All the little trees - they may have been dogwoods, I don't remember - that were on the west side yard are gone. The house looks about the same from the outside, nearly 40 years later. The back yard now looks tiny. For most of the time we lived there, our back yard came up next to a woods, but with the development now there, it really was tiny.
I took a virtual walk around the neighborhood. Much of it I don't remember, because it wasn't there when we lived there. I can see our friends' houses. I decided to retrace the bike ride to the old Rexall's Drug Store and Village Pantry stores that we'd go to on Saturday to buy candy and baseball cards. There's our park to the left and what used to be a soybean field to the right - still some sort of farming field, but can't tell the crop. I don't remember a sidewalk being on Eaton Avenue but it's there now. Past the stop sign where Terry and I picked up the dormant water moccasin and threw it - 11 year olds can be SO stupid - only to find out it had slithered away later when the sun had warmed up the ground that early spring day.
It's a bit longer of a bike ride than I remember, but I get to where it used to be... and there are the buildings, right there on Memorial Drive and Eaton Avenue, both of them. I can't tell what they are now. But they are businesses.
Just an amazing little trip. Thank you, Google Maps.
