The Saucy Southerner, Wisconsin Cheese soup, a sarsaparilla and Turtle Sundae. You know what I’m talking about. I enjoyed fine dining with my family at Hickory Park and experienced the brand new, bigger and better location.

I can’t speak for the rest of the eaters in my group, but I felt immediately insignificant when I walked through the doors and, instead of finding the familiar wooden floors and a long, overstuffed waiting room filled with uncomfortable benches, I was greeted with a huge cavernous train depot with high ceilings and uncomfortable benches.

I wasn’t quite sure how to handle myself. Spacious, yes. Cozy, no. My sister leaned over to tell me that good old HP could serve up to 400 people at one time. Amazing, I thought.

The amazement wasn’t over yet. I went into the ladies’ room and was confused by the blinking lights above the stalls. I tried to figure out the pattern, but gave up and decided maybe they had wanted to get strobe lights but they weren’t in the budget.

Also, for those of you who still have trouble remembering to flush, no worries. These hi-tech potties control that themselves the instant you stand up. The sink follows suit with no knobs or handles getting in the way of your ultra-modern bathroom experience.

The newness of the restaurant made me a little uneasy throughout the whole meal.

The food was still great, our waitress was friendly and the service was a-okay for a busy Sunday night. I didn’t get a chance to have a look at Hickory Park’s work plan, but I’m assuming they built their new place to be bigger, better and capable of serving even more people than they had been cramming into their old location.

However, in their efforts to improve their business, they lost one thing that I felt kept Hickory Park apart from other restaurants: atmosphere. The wooden floors, cozy booths and crowded hallways were a part of Hickory Park and without them it just doesn’t seem the same.

Oh, I’ll still go and eat there (I just can’t say no to their tasty ice cream dishes), but I’ll never feel completely at home as I did in the older building.

Hickory Park isn’t alone, and definitely shouldn’t be blamed for trying to improve their business and keep up with the amount of customers they have. Merchandise and businesses everywhere are continuously changing the old and familiar to keep up with the times and the ever-evolving technology.

I would almost be afraid to buy a computer, since it seems that the techno-wizards of the world come out with new editions or updates every time I turn around. Just when I get 6.0 of a certain program figured out, version 6.5 arrives on the scene, changes just enough things to get me confused and keeps the rest the same.

I think it’s great that our manufacturers want to keep us using top-of-the-line equipment, but I’m starting to wonder if they are doing it on purpose just so we’ll buy a whole new program just for the couple of minuscule changes that were made.

Perhaps I’m just slow to adjust to change. It took me a long time to accept that compact discs were a way of life and not just a passing fancy. I vaguely remember the first CD player I saw when I was maybe 12 years old.

My cousin had one, and I was afraid to even touch it because I thought I would break the CDs. (I probably would have; I tended to be a rather clumsy child.)

I never believed the argument that the sound of a CD is incredibly better than that of a tape or record. I just figured it was another attempt by marketers to make a product seem better, bigger sound, blah, blah, blah.

Despite Hickory Park’s change of scenery, it will still remain a favorite. They can’t fight the pull of competition to be “better.” But in a perfect world, I would be seated in the old building of HP, sharing a Turtle Sundae and listening to tapes.

Joanne Roepke is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora.