Two empty seats in the middle of a crowded international flight? It’s rare, but we had them on a Lufthansa Frankfurt-to-Dallas fight I took last week. I sat on the right aisle of the middle section, happy to discover the adjacent seat empty. The woman on the left aisle was equally thrilled to have those middle seats unoccupied. We rejoiced in our good fortune as we used the two empty places to pile up our jackets, purses, and books.

I had just finished leading a tour for Smithsonian Journeys through the Baltic countries and St. Petersburg. This woman had taken a different tour of Moscow and St. Petersburg. With that commonality, we might have talked non-stop, even across the empty seats, but we both were tired, blaming the 3:30 a.m. hotel departure necessary to catch the flight out of Russia. So we exchanged only pleasantries.

Still, during the nearly 11-hour ride, she repeatedly said out loud to no one in particular, “I can’t wait to get home.” An hour would pass, and then she’d say, “I can’t wait to go home and sleep in my own bed.” Her desire to return home seemed to overshadow all of the glories of her trip.

I understand that. Even on the luxurious tours I lead, where we sleep on puffy pillows and graze at breakfast buffets running the gamut from flax seed to caviar, I still count on my fingers the days before I go home. Sometimes my count is more of an idle curiosity (“How many days do we still have until this tour is over?”). But other times it’s more urgent: “Just four more days before I can go home!”

Don’t misunderstand me. I cherish every minute of these tours, and enjoy each person in my groups. I am blessed beyond measure to be able to travel extensively in this period of my life. Travel is the greatest classroom and, as a teacher, I treasure the chance to teach in it.

But home is home. Nothing is as powerful as the path to home, at least not for me. Only upon returning home can I process what really happened during a tour. The places, personalities, and particulars sort themselves out best in my own kitchen. From the quiet of home, I can gauge what I learned.

But there is a clash, too. I tend to idealize what it means to be home while I’m still traveling. I envision myself arriving home and turning it into a paradise. I imagine alphabetizing the spice drawers and unpacking the last 20 boxes from our recent move. The garage will be magically empty and surely I’ll find everything I’m missing. While I’m at it, I’ll match all the socks and maybe even iron the towels.

Okay, I’m joking about ironing the towels, although my childhood girlfriend and I did that in elementary school. We were going to surprise her momma. And we did, by scorching the towels. At least we didn’t starch them.

But, towels aside, this idealized home that occupies my imagination while traveling never gets realized. Just as one cannot experience all the possibilities promised in a travel brochure, one can never quite create the home of the imagination. The socks don’t get matched (at least not mine). The bedding plants won’t get thinned and transplanted. The attic never gets fully organized.

Travel and home have that in common. They are imagined, idealized concepts that butt up against reality. Travelers contend with the discomfort of a bad plane seat and strings of blustery days in what is supposed to be an idyllic sunny spot. The museum you really wanted to see is closed on Monday. Your tummy doesn’t do well with the national cuisine.

The idealized home clashes with its own realities. Home is both the coveted destination and a place with dusty shelves, leaky skylights, and unorganized closets. The roof is questionable after the last round of storms, and the plumbing in the guest bath has started doing weird things.

Still, home remains one of the purest concepts in our human experience. My traveling companion was right when she said, “I can’t wait to get home.” Home is an irresistible ideal–one she, like the Romantic poets, was thirsting for with her longing (Sehnsucht) and homesickness (Heimweh). These two powerful emotions singlehandedly fueled countless stanzas of lyric poetry in the 19th century, particularly the texts by German poets who provided verses for the magnificent songs of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms.

I doubt the lady on the left side of the middle aisle was thinking about Romantic poetry or the gap between the idealized home and the real rooms she’d walk into when she got home. She just wanted to be home. To be in a place where she wasn’t bombarded with new impressions, strange sounds, unexpected flavors, and constant stretching of her natural routine.

Travel stretches us; home restores us to the shapes we understand, albeit with a new tweaks and twists. Experiencing both of these forces—first the drama of travel and then the blessing of return home—is a great gift, leading one to exclaim, to no one in particular: “I can’t wait to go home.” And, mostly likely, soon after that: “When do I get to go again?”