Just Wider.

There's nothing like a nice trip to make you appreciate home.  It may be a cliché, but it is entirely true; not only sentimentally, but on a purely mechanical, practical basis as well.

You see, travel is a great cure for tunnel vision at home.

Consider:

When you travel through a new place, your eyes are quite literally wide open.  You are trying to see everything: scenery, sights, architecture, roads, traffic, signs, lights, people, around the next corner.  Everything, and processing it all in context, too.  Not only is it vital to your enjoyment of a new place, it's vital to your being able to find your way around it.  You're also trying, since you recognize that your time there is going to be fleeting, to memorize as much as possible so that you can recall your visit again and again over the years and savour it properly.

Now at home, you've seen it all.  You know where the roads lead.  You've seen the people.  And yep, that's about the ten thousandth time you've passed by that historic building or looked out over that scenic reach.  Got places to go and people to see, and they're not usually the ones right in front of you.

So your vision narrows.  You wander around your hometown with blinders of familiarity on.

Then you come back from vacation, with your eyes fully retrained for take-it-all-in mode, your brain still in full process-the-context gear.  And pow!  I never noticed that before...

The way the hills lie on the far side of the lake.  The birds in the sky and animals among the trees and lawns.  The curve of the road on your drive to work.  The look of all the shops together on the main street.  The mix and mingle of people on the sidewalks.

And you start to realize, this is how where you live looks to a stranger.  No wonder people like to come here...