Travel thoughts

I read a great travel quote yesterday - "I love to travel, its the arriving that I hate." - attributed to Albert Einstein. That almost summarizes my thoughts toward travel. I travel a bunch for business, 11 trips last year, probably only 5-6 this year. That combined with personal travel (mostly by car) comes up to around 25% of the time that I'm not around. Looking at my stats on flightmemory.com, I have entered in 185 flight segments, for over 500,000 miles - and that's just the trips I have information for, starting around 2002. I have plenty of trips before that. I've earned 1K status on United (flew >100,000 miles last year, as they measure), which comes in useful on family trips when things go wrong.

I look forward to each trip, getting into the planning, checking what movies will be on the flights, finding out about the airports and cities I'll be going to, how to get to the hotel, etc. Flights can be annoying, but kind of fun too - I really like flying. Being at the destination, though for me is different than the quote above - I'm already looking forward to the return trip.
The big disadvantage for me is that on business trips I tend to be alone, and I really hate to go into a restaurant alone, and eat alone, with nothing to do but look at the other patrons in the restaurant. Since much of my travel goes outside the US, I also get to play 'the ugly American', since I can only order and converse in English. (Not that I haven't tried picking up some basics in other languages, but I've traveled to Copenhagen, Prague, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich, Beijing and will be going to Lisbon - that's a lot of languages...)

So, I really look forward to traveling, but am not really happy at the destination, the trip is more about getting there than the destination.