I arrived back in Oxford on Monday afternoon, after almost three weeks of various travels to London, Helsinki, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, and Madrid. My feelings about being home can’t be described as anything other than complete and utter relief.

The contented sigh inevitably following a return home from vacation has always struck me as the validation of the opening passage of The Phantom Tollbooth:

There once was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered.

I worry, sometimes, that my feeling of always wanting to be somewhere else, even when you’re exactly where, ten minutes ago, you wanted to be, is representative of more than just the usual discontent/wanderlust of the Generation Facebook twentysomething. For instance, despite having a truly excellent trip to Spain with my sister, I found myself more holistically satisfied once I arrived at home and was able to unpack, shower, and eat dinner at a familiar restaurant. It’s almost certainly not a problem to appreciate the familiar; but I’m concerned that sometimes, I don’t appreciate the unusual (especially re: traveling) quite enough.

Of course, being unsettled while on my particular vacations this spring is hardly surprising, given the destinations and cirucmstances. In London, I discovered that having the wrong travel companion can render me utterly unable to function, even with regards to the most elementary decisions of what to do or where to eat. In Israel and Spain, I discovered that I’m extremely uncomfortable when I’m somewhere where I don’t speak the native language fluently — even as, in both countries, I had at least a passing acquaintance with Hebrew and Spanish respectively. (I’m conversationally fluent in Hebrew, for that matter, though my lack of public confidence with the language led to me speaking in a quiet mumble the entire time I was in Israel.)

And, for the duration of the trip, I realized that I don’t function well when I’m denied the telecommunications lifeline of my iPhone. Not being able to instantly receive notifications of new e-mail or Twitter mentions stressed me out very fundamentally, and to a greater degree than I really expected. (This has brought back to mind my usual concerns about being over-connected, although at this point I hardly see a way to break that particular pattern.)

Being in Oxford again the past three days has brought back a lot of my usual routine, albeit with a somewhat improved spin. I’m actively appreciating things like 3G data, the functioning of the Oxford library system, and the fact that I don’t pay a 2 percent surcharge when I use my credit card in a way that I didn’t before I left the country. Maybe that, ultimately, is why we go on vacation: so that, when we can look at our day to day lives with some measure of critical distance, we realize that it’s not actually that terrible after all.