A childhood belief about excursions

When I was a kid, there was an intersection in my home town and another that looked very much like it to me in a city that we would occasionally visit, a little over a hundred miles away. The latter reminded me of the former so much that I became convinced they were somehow the same intersection, but in two different towns. I thought, somehow, almost magically, that the street that turned off there in the distant town (which we never turned down) would therefore be a shortcut home, getting us back to my hometown in only a few blocks, rather than 100+ miles. One day I finally ventured to ask my father why we never turned there and took that drastic shortcut home. He just seemed to react like I'd gone crazy, and I don't think he ever caught on to what I was thinking.