re: Question for those that travel a lot for work

I accepted a job offer at the end of 2019 to be the Corporate Director of BD for a company that had offices across the Southeast and Texas. I am married with 4 kids. When I started the job, the oldest 2 were in college and the others were 14 and 10.

At first, I found the idea of traveling a bit for work to be exciting and the novelty of it was for about 6 months. And I wasn’t on a 50% away from home schedule. I averaged about 8-10 days away a month. I set my own schedule and would work around my kids extracurricular activities most of the time.
Even with that, it got old. I grew to really dislike being in airports frequently, picking up and dropping off rental cars, etc.. The novelty of it ran its course rather quickly.
Fortunately, I was asked to come back to my previous company in a lateral move where I would travel only to take clients on entertaining trips. I take a 2-3 day trip once a month now.

Everybody is different and some people love the travel aspect of a career if it is available as an option. It just wasn’t as great as I thought it would be even with the flexibility. But it also wasn’t so bad that I would have looked for another job if my current one wouldn’t have fallen in my lap. However, I was doing 20% on the road and not 50%. That is a big difference in time away and I have no experience with that. Heck, I grew tired of it at just 20%.