GETTING THERE IS LESS THAN HALF THE FUN

I hate to travel.

Okay, that may sound a bit odd to those of you who have an idea of how much traveling I've been doing over the past so many years, but I hate to travel. Now, the automatic response that many of you are probably making is that, no, wait, you hate to travel, meaning the sitting-in-airports part, but surely you love the destination! And while it's true that I find my life richer for having been to some of these places, and I am exceedingly grateful for this opportunity to work while I visit some of these places, I ultimately would rather spend a week puttering around my home than zipping around the globe.

Okay, now having said that, I can say that I'm still grateful for the fact that I have been able to be in all manner of interesting and odd places, the stories you have at the end are great, I wonder if traveling with my wife will make it a lot more fun, forcing myself to get out in the big world has really affected the way I view the world, and the getting-there part of international travel is really in fact the downer.

The getting-there bits of travel aren't always all bad: I've been on, say, long road trips, or train rides, or bike paths, or hikes, where the journey is the journey, but often, well, getting there is much less than half the fun, it's no fun at all.

Maybe it's because I'm a man. Whenever one travels, you see this particular tribe of traveler, the solitary male. Middle-aged, maybe a bit of a paunch; maybe a ring, maybe none; some light hand-carried luggage; business-casual, polo shirts, jeans, khakis; always talking on a cell phone, and I wonder, to whom, to a wife, a mistress, a child, a business partner; and I always wonder about this man's business here, trade, industry, consulting, sex tourist. Whatever it is, these men represent the antithesis of home, and I find it depressing to be among them.

Then there's the interminable amounts of sitting: sitting at the terminal, sitting on the plane, sitting at the lay-over, sitting on a plane. I heard on NPR recently that sitting is a fairly recent human development, that standing and reclining make much more sense in terms of our physiques, and if you ask me, it feels better for our souls. If I were to run Guantanamo, I would have made the inmates sit in modestly padded seats with 30 inches of pitch for days on end, days without night, while the airplane chases the sun around the rotating earth...

And then there's the food. Airports have gotten fascinatingly non-local, all struggling to achieve the same, indistinct, transnational and globalized ideas of what constitutes passably good; the same McDonald's Happy Meal available everywhere in one sense, but in my mind a better illustration is the Irish pub that's in the departure terminal in Dubai's airport, a promise of down-home anywhere but.

I wonder how the hummus will be in Ramallah....