TRAVELS With HANNAH WORLDS AWAY

I like life on the road.

This has always been true. My parents lived 300 miles apart, split between two states. Every other Friday night, from the time I was seven to the time I was 17, I took the hour-long trip from my home, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Boston Logan Airport, where I boarded a plane — first the Pan Am Shuttle, and, in time, the Delta Shuttle — to LaGuardia Airport. My belongings were strewed across state borders. I learned to live out of a carry-on.

This is not a sentimental rumination about what damage divorce does to children. Actually, being a bi-state kid informed my entire perspective. I loved the prospect of a foreign bed. I loved plush hotel sheets, room service, and even the unfamiliar landscapes of other peoples’ bedrooms. I felt just as at home living out of a bag as I did living out of my own closet.

At 40, I can’t nearly say that the thrill of the road has worn off. The only difference is that now I travel on assignment, recording the experiences, meals, and unique moments of my days for whatever piece I happen to be writing. Amid the pandemic, when travel came to an abrupt halt — the longest I had ever gone in a lifetime without setting foot on an airplane, I realized — my wanderlust frothed and bubbled. Nearly outdone by the walls of my own house, which I stared at every day for months, I booked a remote cabin in northern Maine for a chilly October visit.

The truth was, there wasn’t much to do in northern Maine that we couldn’t do in East Hampton, and, in some ways, there was even less to do. The restaurants had mostly closed. My quest to find the region’s best lobster roll was neither a success nor a failure (three of the spots I had been committed to visiting had closed for the season just days before my arrival).

Still, the house was something other than my own, a log cabin with a wood-burning fireplace backing up to Taunton Bay, where a far-off bird, taking flight from the shoreline in the golden dusk, may or may not have been one of the region’s elusive puffins. On a desolate, cold October afternoon, we walked along the pine-studded shores of the Schoodic peninsula. There was nobody there. The wild blueberry bushes had turned fire-red, the water slate gray. An escape meant doing nothing in particular, besides seeing the landscape from a different vantage point.

I’ve started traveling again. This July, I decamped to New England for three weeks straight, bidding farewell to my dogs and house as I rode aboard an early 20th-century schooner for four nights; strolled the streets of Camden, Maine, in search of blueberry pie; tracked the tide at Kennebunkport’s Goose Rocks Beach; pulled noodles from broth at a Kittery restaurant called Anju; and, eventually, settled for nine days on the yellow-duned beaches of my youth, in Massachusetts.

The thing about traveling is that it always comes to an end. And the moment of coming home, overnight bag full of laundry in-hand, is both mournful and triumphant. Equipped with stories from the road, it may feel small to walk through the doors at one’s own home, but there are small corporeal pleasures. Opening the mail. Sifting through the treasures acquired. Opening the refrigerator and finding an ice-cold can of soda. Retiring to a bed with crisp, cold sheets, and the pillow you thought you hated, until you tried all those other hotel pillows, which were nice, but not quite yours.

I often travel in July, and coming back to the East End in the thick of August has its own rewards. Yes, the beaches are crowded, and yes, a restaurant reservation is often impossible to secure. And yet. Returning in the dog days of summer means a chance to slow down, to draw out the marrow of what it means to be home. Unpack the bags. Do the laundry. Shuck the local corn. No matter where you go, there is no better corn.

As I write this, I am planning my next adventures. Next month, I’m off to South Carolina’s Kiawah Island, to cover the booming real estate market and native loggerhead turtle population. After that, it’s a 10-day road trip, beginning in Philadelphia, weaving through Goshen and New Paltz, and ending in my hometown, for a look at the 201st Topsfield Fair — the nation’s oldest agricultural fair. I head to the Mayan Riviera next, followed by Nassau, Bahamas, before settling in for the Thanksgiving holiday. Next year, I’m off to St. John, to Vermont, and possibly even to the Seychelles and Turkey, if the world looks safe enough. I’ll ply my traveling children with dessert for breakfast and iPads for long-haul flights, and, somehow, all of us will survive.

These trips are exciting, but so, too, is the prospect of coming home, of settling back into routine, of walking the beach at Maidstone at sunset, of eating the first chilly weather bowl of onion soup at Rowdy Hall, of fighting through the throngs at Hank’s Pumpkintown to the ceaseless joy of my children, of tasting through spirits in the sun in Sagaponack, of buying the season’s final plums and corn and tomatoes at Balsam Farms, of just one more scoop of ice cream from John’s Drive In. Home is always waiting, and perhaps that’s part of the draw of travel in the first place: when it’s over, there’ always home.