Anyone who has traveled has said, in the middle of some desert or in a moment of intense alienation, “Why am I here?” We know that travel is broadening and restorative, or that some inner compulsion we cannot explain prompts us to do it, or that it has to do with escaping from our quotidian lives. But how? Why do we do it? What are the lessons of travel? I have tried to account for those moments of travel ennui or traveler’s panic we all have felt: the sheer inability to eat another wonton, the desperate wish to be transported by instantaneous space/time travel into one’s own bed.