Am I the Only Person Who Doesn't Like To Travel?

In My Humble Opinion
21

When I was younger, I didn’t like to travel. It always really bugged me when I’d take a week or two vacation from work, and when I went back had to deal with the inevitable barrage of “Where’d you go on your vacation?” I’d have to answer, “Nowhere, I just stayed at home and relaxed.” And then get the “Stayed at home?!” shocked reaction.

Why, in our culture, does EVERYONE assume that EVERYONE goes somewhere when they take a vacation from work? Why is it so shocking that I wanted to be away from work, and I wanted to relax, and that I can relax really well in my own nice comfy home?

Now, in my later life, I’ve done a bit more travelling (it helps to have someone to do it with) and I find that I like going to different places and such, and it’s usually fun. But, so far, it’s been limited to places basically in the US or Canada. Unlike madmonk28, just the thought of being in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, can’t communicate effectively, don’t know what might be on the menu, fills me with total dread.

22

I love to be in a foreign place. Being able to experience another culture is, for me, wonderful (I am not one of those people who will go to a McDonald’s in Spain- except for that one time when a bird pooped on my head and they were the nearest bathroom where I could clean myself up, but that’s a different story). I do, however, hate the getting-there part. Also, now that I’ve got a fairly good grasp on Spanish, I prefer going to Spanish speaking countries so that I can practice. I’ve been to Spain, and Costa Rica is on the agenda for 2 weeks this summer. I hatehatehate planes (too cramped, bad food, and they lost my luggage once!), but to me, its totally worth it to spend the 9 hours or so on a plane to get to somewhere truly amazing for awhile.

I’ve also found that trips with my family are much more stressful than trips without. There’s always too much family drama and bickering.

23

I have never liked to travel, especially not alone. I have a deep-seated impulse to stay near places where I’ve put down my roots, either in my current Texan territory, or in various parts of Louisiana, where I grew up. Being too far away from them causes almost physical discomfort. I like seeing new places and things, I just don’t like the sense of disconnection. It feels the way I imagine phantom-limb syndrome feels. I can put it aside and enjoy trips, but I generally need familiar faces around to do so–friends or family traveling with me provide an anchor of sorts, like I’m taking part of “home” with me.

It doesn’t help that for several years right out of college, my job required me to travel almost constantly–over 70% of the time–and generally landed me in strange places alone for months at a time. It was depressing, and I eventually quit over it. I wasn’t the only one, either; most of the people that were hired into the department with me were already gone by then.

My homebody nature aside, most modern modes of travel stink on ice. I hate flying–it’s almost invariably cramped, noisy, stuffy, and smelly. Also, I know too many engineering students that were going into the industry, and wouldn’t trust them, individually or collectively, to design a folding chair. I find buses very uncomfortable. The passenger rail system in the U.S. may as well not even exist. About the only way I can tolerate getting from Point A to Point B is to drive; at least if I drive, I’ll have my vehicle as a sort of mobile home base.

24

My only idea of enjoyable travel is alone on my motorbike. Or at most someone I’m very fond of can tag along. I really, really hate packing and waiting at airports and being crammed in cattle cars and going to crowded touristy places on tight schedules.

Especially the clueless tourist routine I did so much with my parents. I love my parents and I’m thankful for all the places they’ve given me to know but those trips were such a chore with all the running around and going through the motions because we HAD to see everything in three days.

I don’t mind being away from home but coming back is a nice feeling.

25

to Helen’s Eidolon, your sleeping bag is no more ridiculous than the teddy bear I take with me. In fact it makes a lot more sense. “Libby” the bear is a good luck charm that my wife put in my bag long ago, and I don’t leave home without her. Shoot, I forgot my American Express card, but I got Libby!

26

Exactly like Frank said. I love being in new places. I love train rides. I love car road trip. I love buses and even ships. I love it all.

Planes? The thought is making me nauseous and icy-cold with fear right now.

27

I love to travel and see new places and experience new things. I love to try all the local foods and traditions. I like to hear stories either true or made up. I like to people watch and just listen to the way that the locals talk. I like to read the local newspaper. I like to go to the grocery stores. I sometimes will even go into a barbershop to get my haircut!

However, in order to do all of this, I got to do some other things to kinda keep me “in balance.” When I travel with my family I feel “on guard” and slightly out of sorts, especially at night. I am a family man and I live in a cozy comfy house where I keep a cozy comfy schedule where I feel totally at ease and feel that my family is totally safe. However, when I travel, all of these feelings are gone and this is what we (my family feels the same way and this has evolved over time) do to make our trip enjoyable. Some of these things sound a little silly and may seem like they contridict the fun of travel, but it works for us!

-We usually travel by car and we have have satellite radio. My wife gets her daily NPR comfort, I get my sports update comfort, my daughter gets her music, no matter where we are. Having this helps us endure the boring parts of long trips and keeps us “connected” to the outside world.

-We take our own food supplies for our “comfort” snacks- the same stuff we eat at home on a regular basis. Even when we travel to a place with great food (New York, San Francisco, New Orleans), neither my wife or I can eat out constantly- our bodies start to rebel after a while and we start to feel wierd. We just gotta have “our regular food” mixed in there somewhere.

-As I mentioned we like to go to the local supermarket to pick up supplies, and we also like to get hotels with small fridges and microwaves to keep and warm up our comfort food. In addition, the hotel has to have an interior hallway. I just feel safer that way.

-It is not necessary for the hotel to have cable, but it does help. I sleep much better after watching the Daily Show, my wife and daughter seem more relaxed after they watch one of those ridiculous entertainment report shows. I know that it sounds awful, but on long trips it helps to have little parts of our “usual schedule” intact.

-We take our own pillows. Not only are they handy in the car, but my body is used to the thickness of the pillow that I use every night. Sometimes hotel pillows are super firm and thick and I don’t get a good nights sleep b/c I am tossing and turning. My wife will sometimes pack her own sheets because she has seen too many of those newsmagazine shows that show all the blood, semen and fecal stuff spread all over the place in hotel rooms.

-My daughter brings her laptop. I use it for weather reports, directions, and for last minute info I forgot to write down. She is allowed to IM her friends for a little bit. If we are in a place within cell phone range, she is allowed to text message. If we are on the road and in cell phone range, she can talk for a few minutes. If we are in a place where we have to wait for a long time for something and there is nothing else to do, she can text or talk. This bit of mobile electronic communication comfort cuts down on the whining and complaining. It can also be used as leverage (just like at home!).

Bottom line, I understand those who feel uncomfortable when they are away from their cozy homes. I understand how this feeling might interfere with the desire to travel. However, there might be ways to adjust so that you can still experience the joys of travelling if you ever get the urge.

28

I don’t really care for travel, for a somewhat different reason. Whenever I go someplace, I feel like I have to DO EVERYTHING there is to do or else I am not getting my money’s worth and I might as well forget the whole thing. This attitude was undoubtedly instilled by my dad, who spent the entire vacation (at least the ones where it wasn’t just a theme park vacation, like when we went to DC or Colonial Williamsburg) parading us around into a frenzy, until we got the crap-vacation equivalent of Stendhal Syndrome. I came to see vacations as being more work than fun, because you had to cram your day with Stuff or your vacation isn’t worthwhile. And of course, you can never travel by yourself. In addition to being dangerous it is also antisocial. So travel to me means being stuck with a bunch of people in a strange situation where you have to blitz around to various museums and battlefields all day long. Faced with that, I’d rather just stay home.

I might like travel if I could maybe take a week to be somewhere and just take it EASY, soak up the local color at my own pace and not go to see all the educational and cultural stuff because I have to, but because I want to. But as it is I see vacationing as being more stressful than staying at home; it took days to recover from family vacations. Besides, not doing everything you can possibly do is equivalent to Wasting Your Money and Not Taking Full Advantage of the Situation, which is a Bad Thing.

(Enough superfluous capitalization in this post?)

29

When I think about the money and time involved in travelling, if it ain’t in NYC, I ain’t interested.

30

What he said. :slight_smile:

31

I don’t like traveling on business if my wife can’t come with me. I hate hotel beds. They’re all ridiculously hard. I have to take sleeping pills or else I’ll wake up 50 times in the night. I sleep like a baby at home.

Travel sucks.

except to Las Vegas

32

Oh, I could spend the rest of my life wandering the globe. Plane, boat, train – whatever. Nothing’s ever fazed me. I’d live overseas if I could.

What I can’t stand are road trips. More than 2 hours in a car or bus and I get beyond restless. I think it’s because of the anticipatory nature – I want to be there already! Why didn’t we fly?

Mr. Kiz hates flying. If he cannot get there by car, he will not go there.

I respect that, but I’ll never for the life of me understand it shakes head

33

I don’t hate travelling, but I can’t get enthusiastic about it either. I do like getting new experiences, a lot. But to me, travelling to distant lands seems like an very inefficient way of getting new experiences. If you’ve seen one hotel, one colorful market, one overcrouwded bus, you’ve seen them all. I’m not saying “abroad is all the same” because, hey, I know better then that. But the way most people travel doesn’t really allow them to do more then scratch the surface. Let me give an example, and I’ll focus on the "getting to know people from other culuters"part that is often cited as an important reason for travelling.

I’m interested in meeting people from other cultures, sure. But does travel really allow such contact? Lets see whom a typical backpacker will meet on his two-month trip to Asia.
a your fellow Western backpackers. I meet those too. At work or at parties when they have returned, showing their scrapbooks and slideshows and journals and whatnot.
b owners of hotels and such, with whom contact is only possible in sofar as they ARE westernized. Okay, so I don’t get to meet those, but somehow I don’t think any deep profound contact was lost there.
c people who want to sell you something on the streets. Crowding, yelling. I don’t get to meet those either, thank God.
e all those colorful old tattoed men and women on that Indian market or that Arab “souk”. No, I don’t get to walk past them or see them through from the windows of my vehicle. But as I don’t really get into contact with them anyway (and no, asking them if it’s okay to photgraph them doesn’t count as personal contact, sorry) I really don’t see why I couldn’t watch a documentary on TV instead. It sure yields more insight and offers more highligts.

If I want to meet people from other cultures, I only have to go to my local ethnic market and strike up a conversation about how to prepare something with that okra or pumpkin or spice-mix. Or I could offer hospitality or some friendly chitchat to a passing tourist to the Netherlands. Or I could join a board like the SDMB, where I can talk extensively with all sorts of typical Americans, Brits, Australians etcetera. And the wonderful thing is, you’re all both understandable to me, yet wonderfully exotic. And last but not least, I could enroll for some form of (volunteer)work where I get to meet people form other cultures.
All these ways work better to get in contact with other cultures that travel abroas has brought me, and they’re considerably cheaper (in money, time and effort) then travelling, which allows me to spend more time at it.

Another thing is that Americans are much more homogenous then Europeans. Both geographically and socially. geographically Just 50 miles from my hometown, two languages other them my own are spoken, and I can get there and be back home in time for my own bed. Or think socail culuture differences. In a ten-mile radius from my home, I could visit a posh golf-club with posh members, or a white-trash filled trailerpark that has turned into a state-withing-a-state. Both the golf-club members and the trailertrash are as different from me, culturally, as that old tattooed lady in that Moroccan souk. I’m proud to say I’ve made an effort to get to know both (sub) cultures.

34

I like to travel, but I probably qualify as such a curmudgeon about it I fit in more with your camp.

I have a hard time relaxing–probably leftover from spending too much time in school, always feeling like there was SOMETHING I should be doing. Travel represents a “getting away” that I can’t duplicate any other way.

However, that said, I can’t relax if things are too unfamiliar. I don’t like feeling lost or clueless, or unable to communicate. Travelling to an overly exotic or strange locale defeats the purpose of going (for me).

Later in life when I chill out, I think I’ll enjoy travel in a different way. At this stage of my life, though… I just want to be able to get away from the house, the laundry, my work, the kitchen, so I can read a goddamned book with a peaceful conscience.

35

I like going places, it’s the “getting there” that I have the issues with. Train rides I can handle, but driving and flying - I can’t get on board with that.

Once I’m there, if it’s TOO unfamiliar, I’m like Cranky - I can’t relax.

That being said, I really don’t travel. I just have no need nor inclination to do so.