What’s a place you visited that felt like home?
There are places you visit and immediately start thinking about what you want to see before you leave. Then there are places where, somewhere along the way, you stop feeling like a visitor.
Highlands, North Carolina, became that kind of place for me.
It sits high in the mountains of western North Carolina, far removed from the flat landscape and sprawling development of Jacksonville. The roads twist through the mountains. The temperature drops. The scenery changes completely. On paper, there isn’t much about it that should feel like home to a lifelong Floridian.
But familiarity has a way of changing geography.
I’ve been there enough that I don’t think of Highlands primarily as a vacation destination anymore. I know the roads. I recognize places as we pass them. I don’t feel any urgency to cram everything possible into a visit because I assume there will be another one. There is something different about arriving somewhere and thinking, “We’re back,” instead of, “We’re here.”
Family is a large part of that.
A place becomes more than scenery when people you love are attached to it. Eventually the memories aren’t simply of mountains, restaurants, shops or overlooks. They’re memories of conversations, meals, holidays and ordinary moments that happened to take place there.
Carthage, Texas, used to feel that way, too.
Going to my grandmother’s house on the outskirts of town always felt like going home. It wasn’t really about Carthage itself as much as what was waiting there. Her house was familiar. The roads were familiar. The people were familiar. I knew where I was and, more importantly, I knew I belonged there.
She’s not there anymore, of course, and time has a way of changing places even when the roads and buildings stay the same. But I have a feeling that if I went back to Carthage today, I would still feel something familiar. I would still feel like I was among friends.
Maybe that’s because home isn’t always a physical place. Sometimes it’s the memory of being known there.
That’s probably what makes somewhere feel like home.
Home isn’t necessarily the place where you were born, the place listed on your driver’s license or even the place where you own a house. Sometimes it’s simply a place where you have spent enough pieces of your life that you no longer feel the need to introduce yourself to it.
I still live in Jacksonville. That’s home.
But Highlands feels like a place I’ve come to know well enough to belong there. And Carthage still carries the memory of a home that existed there long before I ever understood how much those places would matter.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
