A guy I know just got back from the trip of a lifetime.

He retired, bought a new BMW in Germany and spent the next three months touring Europe. Fabulous fish soup in the south of France. Beer at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. Nearly a week exploring Mont St. Michel. The Austrian Alps. The museums of London. Even a sushi lunch in Liechtenstein. He did it all.

And you know what the best part was?

"Finding out that my wife and I still like being together 24 hours a day," he said on the day he got home.

That's really why we travel, to discover the truth about ourselves. We visit strange places to feel more comfortable in familiar ones. We sit in a Venetian cafe and compare it to Starbucks in Kailua. We spend time alone together on the road to strengthen the marriage ties back home.

My own road to these realizations started the day after I got married more than 25 years ago.

Instead of nice hotels in Paris or the Alps, we spent our six-week honeymoon living out of a camper conversion van as we ventured across Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the American Southwest during one of the coldest winters on record in the last century.

Traveling together can make or break a friendship, to say nothing of a marriage. By the time we hit the Pacific Ocean and started packing for a new life on Guam, we knew for certain the marriage thing was going to work. And it has, ever since.

Still, we travel sometimes just to be sure. Of course, we've had plenty of great travel experiences, but somehow it's moments on the other end of the spectrum that are lodged in the memory.

We've been camping in snowstorms, robbed in Madrid, stranded in Crete, out of gas in southern Illinois, sick in Hong Kong, hounded in Dallas, lost in East Germany, nearly arrested in Munich, shanghaied in Suzhou, and drunk in Bangkok (OK, that was just me). One night in particular, spent sleeping in a truck stop just outside of Prague, always comes up when we reminisce.

That's the way it is when you venture out into a world filled with strange people, languages and customs. The pleasure of travel exists mostly in retrospect and seldom at the instant it is being experienced, a wise man once said. Samuel Johnson added that the use of traveling is to see things as they are instead of thinking how they may be. Up close, things rarely look as nice as they do in the guide book, but they always look better in the photo album.

Through a lifetime of travel, there are two things I've learned: My wife and I really do enjoy being together 24 hours a day, no matter how rough the road becomes, and from now on, we're traveling only on cruise ships.