Knowing 80% of the nation is going somewhere and spending big leads to summer travel fear of missing out, or FOMO. But I also like staying home. Trip planning induces accommodation anxiety. My kryptonite is that breed of inconsiderate traveler who seem to think the main goal of staying in a campground or hotel is to make as much noise as possible as late into the night as possible. And standard hotel construction means that, except for two pieces of 5/8-inch sheetrock and some insulation, there’s nothing between you and the activities in adjacent rooms.

I have some stories but they’re not suitable for a family publication.

Anticipated sleep interruptions aside, escaping routine is appealing. Airplanes make it easy and air travel is a secular miracle. Flying east to visit family takes just seven hours including one stop. By the time I land in Montreal, I’d barely be past Cheyenne, Wyoming, if I had driven east on I-80. An even more happy comparison is to note that a journey by stagecoach and rail 150 years ago would have taken dusty weeks.

My travel FOMO also ranges from wondering whether those people with rugged Toyota truck camping setups have exciting adventures, such as month-long off-road journeys across the Tibetan Plateau or the Australian Outback. Or I get curious about RV camper folks, fetched up on lawn chairs in front of a smoky campfire, surrounded by enough stuff to hold a pop-up Walmart sidewalk sale. They seem enviably content.

Then there are the dreamy far-flung experiences posted on social media, where people always seem to be having the GREATEST TIME ever. These also induce FOMO, though often my sharpest memories rarely seem to be about counting stars by candlelight, in the words of Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.

As a child, on trips with my father, especially, improvisation didn’t always go well. Many a night we slept in the vinyl-clad interior of our Chevy Citation after a day of being hangry. My father liked to skip lunch so we could “work up an appetite” for dinner, which always involved a fruitless quest for the perfect local-color restaurant. I realize 300,000 Utahns suffer daily from food insecurity. And there are others sleeping in their car every night because they lack housing. So, it’s fair to say we were fortunate to have vacations even if a little hunger and sleeping in the car came with the territory, literally. But still.

Then there was the challenge of traveling to visit family as a teenager. As my Indiana grandmother liked to say, “Mercy sakes.” One uncle loved lengthy tirades against government agencies like OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that interfered with his dental practice. There was a lecherous step-grandfather, a WWII Navy Pacific Theater veteran, fond of saying things like, “Looks like we got some cheesecake out in the yard,” only he was referring to my teenage sister soaking up some Florida sunshine. Decades later came screaming nieces. General squabbling. Me, the perfect angel, only occasionally saying inflammatory things.

Unattached young-person travel was different. It was freeing. In my 20s, I lived to travel. I was pathologically frugal and could survive on next to nothing. An accomplished dumpster diver friend was an inspirational mentor, setting the frugality bar even lower. He dined like a king on unsold convenience store pizza slices and expired supermarket foods.

Comfort is relative. There’s a sweet spot in the ratio of hardship to pleasure, and in fact my younger self thought hardship was pleasure. Such idiocy came in handy on a filthy but cheap 50-hour train ride to Istanbul or a $9/night bed in a half-flooded Greek hostel basement, for example. Hitchhiking was also a money-saving passion, with unforgettable rides: the scary backwoods drunks. The gun-toting self-confessed felons. Those with, mmm, let’s call it — romance — in mind.

Money can buffer these sorts of unpleasantries. At the same time, it elevates expectations: When the exclusive resort’s plumbing malfunctions or the airline rebooks you from Economy into Lavatory Class, Row 47 — that’s aggravating. The solution is tempting: Spend even more. But now the miscues are amplified. For instance, to avoid traffic, on summer weekends some years ago a friend was flying back and forth between Manhattan and a summer place in the Hamptons, using a chartered luxury helicopter. I once hitched a ride but the chopper was 30 minutes late. For me, such travel was a distinct step up from literally hitching rides on flatbed trucks in the mountains of Vermont. Yet my friend, irate, was on his phone, pacing and tersely reminding the company the helicopter was supposed to save him time.

The fact is, travel can be maddening. Odysseus knew this. Even though he lived before the age of norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships, overrun Instagrammable places and climate-change induced European heatwaves, he struggled with cannibals, monsters, witches and shipwrecks.

Sometimes the greatest reward of travel is returning home, even if the refrigerator is empty and the sprinklers are malfunctioning. This summer, let stories emerge from new adventures. Then enjoy retelling them in familiar backyard comfort.

By next summer the hard edge of jet lag, smoky fires, or paper-thin walls will have receded to a good story and whichever way your pleasure tends, as Jerry Garcia sang, you might just find yourself on the road again.

Hal Crimmel is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of English who served for nine years as chair of the English department at Weber State University. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.