This is a more specific instance of something more general: new things are more exciting in the short term.
Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill.
Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general.
When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years.
It's hard now to even tell one year from the other.
I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays.
Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.
Anecdotally, I can say I have traveled for leisure (not work) every month or two for the last 5+ years, 90% of the time to a new place, and my experience aligns with @peoplefromibiza's perspective.
I think you have a point. But it sounds to me like your example was more similar to repetitive traveling for work than a unique travel experience each time. I don't know much about touring, but how different could've your daily routine really have been?
Touring is completely different from traveling for work, which I do too.
Touring is like traveling, it is in fact traveling at its best, it's like an adventure.
The only difference with traveling for leisure is that you don't stay in the same location for long, but you are away from home for a long time nonetheless.
Usually you travel around 200kms a day on average, someday it's 800km under the snow, some day it's 50kms on the coastline of beautiful Sardinia, but you might cross region borders or country borders, people speak different languages, you travel from north to south or west to east and everything changes.
East Germany and West Germany are different, German Switzerland and French Switzerland are different, Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels-area in Belgium are different.
North and South Italy are completely different.
To explain my point better I'll tell you what a musician told me.
One year we met with Bob Log III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Log_III) a few times, because we were playing in the same venues, so we spent few nights together before and after the shows.
He told us he used to make a crazy number of shows in Europe, sth like 80 shows in 3 months.
He always travels alone, at least he did at the time, and drive his own car.
One night he was going from Innsbruck in Austria to Stockholm in Sweden where he had a show 48 hours later, stopping at the northern German border to get some sleep.
He told us it wasn't uncommon for him, he did it to pack as much shows as possible in as little time as possible, earn as much money possible, and then spend a couple of holiday weeks with his family in some European city, before going back home.
But then he said he stopped doing it.
He was only doing 30 shows in a row at max, no more than that.
Why, we asked.
He said: because as fun as it is to be always around partying with the great people that come at my shows who am I grateful to, because they are the ones allowing me to live my life as a musician, I started forgetting things.
I couldn't remember faces, dates, venues.
I kept going to the same places and not remembering people names.
So he decided to do less shows, max 30, in a bit less than two months, to make good memories that stayed.
What I wanna say is that it is absolutely non-boring, non-repetitive and definitely not something that feel like working, not at the level I did it anyway, but too much is too much, even too much fun can be too much and lose its meaning.
I kind of think what you said here actually proves my point. I didn't mean it's not adventurous or exciting, it's just that it becomes too familiar when you do it repetitively for the same reason under the same circumstances.
I've been doing occasional consulting work for the past 3 years for which I have to travel once or twice a month on most months. When I first started, every place I went to felt adventurous and unique. And now, if I'm traveling to someplace I've never visited even when I have to work on something I've never worked before, it just doesn't feel remotely unique or adventurous as it did before, especially in retrospect. I used to love talking to my friends what exciting things I've seen or people I've met, but now I don't think about it twice when I get home. My mind just kind of got used to it, it doesn't store it in the database with the unique or adventurous attributes set to true. Stuff just kind of goes in the "traveling for work" basket in the mind and gets all shuffled up, I've already forgot most names and faces of the people I've worked with as well and it hasn't even been that long. Sometimes I'll leave a meeting and 5 minutes later won't be able to remember someone's name.
But on the other hand, when I'm going somewhere and the circumstances have nothing to do with my work, even if I'm going somewhere I've already been before but the circumstances are different this time, both at that time and in retrospect it feels more unique and adventurous.
I think it's because when you do something repetitively, for the same reason and under similar circumstances, the associations in your mind kind of blend it all together.
I'm Italian, I toured regularly with an Italian band here and with some small-to-medium band from USA around Europe (the festival season in spring-summer is actually pretty great).
They were mainly from the so called "stoner" scene, such as Farflung, Fatso Jetson, Naam, White Hills etc.
Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill.
Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general.
When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years. It's hard now to even tell one year from the other.
I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays.
Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.