I enjoyed reading this. It made me think about the sense of loss in an RPG when a place is destroyed and you can't go back. Then I was thinking about the movie where John Cusak finds the gas station where his house used to be ... I moved around a lot as a kid and have experienced that mental remapping you mention too.

(Then I clicked over to Facebook and found NPR had posted "Help Us Capture Stories Of Places That No Longer Exist" ... heh. Apparently it's "geographic mono no aware/nostalgia Sunday.")