I used to love to travel. Usually didn't matter where or how. When I was very young, this meant car trips between relative's houses, of varying length depending on who was living where when. When the distances got great enough, it meant the rare, and exciting, airplane trip. I still remember getting a set of plastic Piedmont Airlines wings, and playing the Merlin, which I'd just gotten for Christmas, while waiting for a connection as an unaccompanied minor. Not every trip was great, but it was usually always an adventure.
As a young adult, once I learned to drive and had a car, I did less flying but plenty of driving for trips, back and forth to college, some family visits here and there, and a few trips just for the hell of it. I've got a soft spot for John Mellencamp's Minutes to Memories in part because of its reference to a trip up the length of Indiana. In his story, it's on a bus, but the time I did more or less the full length it was in a car.
My big adventure, though, was the October through May time I spent studying abroad. It's common enough for people to do that it has become a cliché--some people like to hear about your gap year or year abroad or whatever just like some people like to see baby pictures. To most of us, though, newborns all pretty much look the same, and all travel abroad stories usually are more exciting for the teller to recall than for the listener to hear. (NB: As a parent and one who took a JYA, I would like to see baby pictures and hear about the place you visited. Just saying in general interest seems to run the other way.)
So, maybe those details will make it into another rant someday, but it's not my point now to relate them. Rather, my point is that travel used to be fun for me. Not so fun that I shaped my life around it (except for some key touchstones I might, again, mention if and when I relate the year-abroad story), but still, something I usually embraced.
Then, 9/11 happened. A few years later, we started our family. I've never been particularly spare in my packing, but even the most adept at honing down what to carry and what to leave behind is carrying a lot more stuff when a kid is on the trip, including the kid herself. Combine this with the maddeningly inconsistent and sometimes impossible demands brought to us by whichever local semi-pro security theater troupe one might be facing at any given airport, air travel in particular turned into something I loathed more than I loved.