[at_a_remove]

I have always despised travel, possibly as a result of being moved around a lot as a child.

I do not care for a single facet of it. Not the planning, or the reservations, of the attaining of paperwork. Packing or parking. Checking maps to see where my terminal might be. Pre-flight fondling by total strangers. Getting on a plane. Being on a plane. Getting off of a plane. Trying to find my way to wherever it is I am supposed to go, which I know in theory but must now execute. I also have a mild handicap which can make navigating some situations more difficult than it would otherwise be for someone normal. Seeing just kind of torture the word "breakfast" has undergone to appear in the hotel at morning.

Then there is the thing itself, whatever it is you are supposed to be seeing. Chances are, you won't even be able to get close to it. Apparently, you get to look at the Mona Lisa from something of a distance, and now less than a minute. Oooh. Then you should get a laminated card that says "Some photons bounced off of the Mona Lisa and were absorbed by my retina" so you can tell everyone.

And you're trapped wherever it is until your ticket home is valid.

Even if someone else is paying for it, I just have zero interest. Unfortunately, some friends have gotten into cruises and traveling, which leads to frequent exhortation that I, too, should travel, no matter how much I demur. Being pushed for travel was also an irritant at a previous job.

They say, "Well, think of all of the strange foods and new restaurants!" I spend more time at the international markets than most and, honestly, this city has plenty of restaurants I have yet to try, so if that were a motivating factor, I hardly need a plane ticket and itinerary to partake.

The furthest I have gone is about three hundred miles to take a close friend (he had a very terrible year of one disaster after another occur to him) to a concert to cheer him up.

[em-bee]

i can sympathize. all the things you don't like about traveling, i don't like either. thankfully it is possible to avoid many of them. at least in europe you can travel by train, which is a lot more comfortable than airplanes. when i go somewhere i make contact to locals in advance which often means that i get picked up, so i don't have to navigate tourist traps, or at least i get the local instructions how to get to the city. i spent two weeks in paris with local friends, and we didn't do a single day of sightseeing. no museum, and i don't remember if we even went to see the eiffel tower. the only true sightseeing that i enjoyed was the great wall in china which i was able to visit while living in beijing. and again, thanks to locals i got there on public transport instead of a tourist bus.

and yes, you can do a lot of exploring locally too.

to your last point going to a concert with a friend, i think the important part here is the reason you did that, not the distance or even the destination. not even the concert. for me, having such a reason makes traveling all the more worthwhile.