I think the experience of travel has been changed by the Internet and wireless as nothing else has. Or perhaps it's just that the wonder of the technology is clearest when you're thousands of miles away, you log onto iChat, and two of your coworkers and your children are immediately pinging you-- and none of them consider it particularly remarkable that they're in California and I'm 5000 miles away.
I'm finding that so long as I can get online, I don't really feel like I'm away. Of course I know I'm in a different country, having spent 10 relatively uncomfortable hours in an airplane; but I don't feel cut off if there's a connection available at the end of the day.
Travel used to involve a deep sense of separation from home, the knowledge that a letter could take a week to get home and a phone call was a luxury. Now, at least in the places I go, that's no longer so.
[To the tune of The Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," from the album "Forty Licks (Disc 1)".]
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