When Going Home Means Going on Vacation NYTimes.com

WHEN Derek Saathoff visits his native Louisville, Ky., each month, he likes to make a long weekend of it. Continental Flight 2925 out of Newark on Thursday afternoon gets him to Louisville just before 4:30, in plenty of time for a run in a park before dinner at Mojito’s Tapas and drinks at the Pink Door, a noodle and tea lounge with a bar.

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Go to Escapes » Enlarge This Image Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

FAMILIAR WATERS Joanna Roche and John Stringer vacation at Goose Pond in Lee, Mass, where they swam growing up.

Until recently, Mr. Saathoff would have bunked with his parents or one of his siblings. But since May, he’s had a place of his own, a one-bedroom condo on the third floor of a converted Victorian house, just three blocks from his old high school.

“When I was growing up, I wanted to leave and move to New York as quickly as possible,” said Mr. Saathoff, 25, an agent at Wilhelmina Models, whose primary residence is a studio apartment in the East Village. “And now I find myself torn between the city and Louisville. I’ve got the easier life in Kentucky, and the metropolitan life here.”

“Considering the prices, I didn’t find buying something in the Hamptons or upstate New York feasible or even necessarily desirable,” he continued. “They’re not the places I’d go to rejuvenate or to recharge my batteries.”

Leaving home is a classic rite of passage; for many people it’s the great, long-deferred escape. When they visit their former homes, it’s under duress and then only for holidays and familial state occasions.

Others return after college or after a few years in the big city having decided that yes, the native sod really is a great place to raise children.

Then there are those who split the difference: they live elsewhere, but own a vacation property in their hometown or environs.

“You grow up and you move away because of your job and you find it’s a nice place to come back to,” said Tricia Dieringer, a hosiery company owner who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but also has a house at a Rehoboth Beach, Del., golf resort a few minutes from Lewes, her hometown. “I come across Delaware Memorial Bridge and there’s this peaceful feeling of coming home.”

For some, the pull of home is largely emotional, a chance to relive select precious pieces of their childhoods, to revisit select landmarks — Ms. Dieringer is partial to the Lewes Beach Dairy Queen where she worked as a teenager — and to give their own children a sense of continuity.

That’s the case as well for Susan Helier, a legal assistant and single mother in Salt Lake City who grew up in East Hampton, N.Y., and who, 10 years ago, built a three-bedroom vacation home there.

“There’s a lot of history here that I share with my daughter,” she said of her Long Island hometown. “I take her to Georgica Pond, where we used to go sailing and crabbing. As a little kid I used to go to the nature trail, so I take her there as well.”

The trip down memory lane also includes stops at the tip of Montauk (as a teenager, Ms. Helier dated the son of the lighthouse keeper) and the Hampton Classic (Ms. Helier was a habitué when it was a low-key horse show.)

Similarly, Joanna Roche says she loved growing up in Lenox, Mass.

“Everyone knew me,” said Ms. Roche, the vice president of sales for Cypress, a supplier of linens to hotels and spas. “It was very safe. But growing up in such a small town, I wanted to move away.”

After several years of living in California and Hawaii, she headed back to Lenox and married her long time boyfriend John Stringer. The couple subsequently bought a weekend getaway on Goose Pond, one town over in Lee, Mass.

“My husband’s family had a house there the entire time he was growing up, and this is basically a tradition we want to pass along to our children,” said Ms. Roche.

Where she swam and boated as a child so will her two boys. The same stretch of the Appalachian Trail she hiked, “they’ll be able to do,” Ms. Roche said. “I think it’s very grounding for children to have those roots.”

And, apparently, very grounding for adults as well. Such is the case with Vanessa Jones, a real estate broker who has an apartment in Harlem and owns a vacation property a mere five blocks from her childhood home in the View Park section of Los Angeles.

“My brother’s godmother lives next door,” Ms. Jones said. “It’s a very tight-knit community, a little Mayberry. I like that small-town feeling.”

Ms. Jones decided to hang on to the two-bedroom Los Angeles bungalow, originally her primary residence, as a weekend getaway when she moved to New York seven years ago.

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