pushd

pushd and popd are very easy ways of going to a directory, doing some stuff there, then returning to the previous directory.

>pwd
/home/gmccreight
>pushd /var/logs
>pwd
/var/logs
#do some things in the /var/log directory
>popd
>pwd
/home/gmccreight

Also check out the alias command. You may have + aliased to pushd and - aliased to popd.