As any blogger knows, developing a relationship with one’s readers is vital. At the same time, going through the comments that readers post can be harrowing. Under cloak of Internet anonymity, will they go for your jugular? Or just your balls? Will they praise the post you put together, half hung over, one morning while brushing your teeth, and pan the one you carefully crafted over weeks of research? Did any of them even really read the article?

Well, today, when I fully announced my retirement from the Frugal Traveler column, I got a nice surprise: love—lots of it—in the comments section.

It’s funny, when I was out there doing this job, I always felt just like a regular traveler trying to get through a challenging adventure. I knew that at the end, people would be reading about it, but that concept seemed so distant, so unimaginably ridiculous, that it was never until much later–like, maybe, today–that I realized how much effect my time on the road would have on people I’d never met.

Anyway, it’s a nice feeling to have people say they appreciate what you’ve done for them (I hope one day Sasha expresses a similar sentiment) and for that, I’m tearing up with gratitude.

But only a little.

“The Unnamed,” the relatively new novel by Joshua Ferris, the acclaimed author of “Then We Came to the End,” was pretty much written specifically for me. It’s about Tim Farnsworth, a well-paid lawyer who works in Manhattan, lives happily in New Jersey with his wife and daughter, and is cursed with a disease that compels him to walk—and walk and walk and walk. His legs seem possessed, and whether he’s asleep at home or preparing for a court date, they’ll take control and lead him off in whatever direction for hours and hours, until at last they relent and he crawls into a corner and falls asleep, utterly drained.

It’s a potentially gimmicky story, but since Ferris is a good writer, he pulls it off, in part by not stressing the metaphors that spring easily to mind. Chief of which (at least for me) is: Is this a parable of in-built human wanderlust? What unknowable forces drive us out of our homes, away from the ones we love, and in search of what exactly?

Obviously, this is a matter of some concern to me. I love my family—they mean more to me than anything—yet I’m driven to leave home for weeks at a time. In part this is just a hazard of my profession, but I also happen to like my work quite a lot. I might even be doing this if I wasn’t actually a travel writer. The need to explore, to turn a corner into the unexplored, is just that great.

Anyway, there’s a point in the novel—spoiler alert!—where Tim, in the grip of his disease, decides simply not to return home ever again, to let his legs carry them as far as they wish, even if it means never sleeping with his wife or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his daughter for the rest of his life. Years later, his wife tracks him down at a diner and pleads with him to return. He thinks for a minute, then says: “I don’t want you.”

It’s a tough moment, but a true one. For us solo wanderers, guilt is often our only companion, and I’ve often thought that it would be better for all concerned if my family were rid of me and no longer had to put up with such uncertainty. Wouldn’t it be easier if they simply knew I wouldn’t be around at all, and could just move on from there? Isn’t it selfish of me to force this insanity on them?

But inertia is a hard thing to overcome (unless you’re stricken with that unnamed disease), and such cataclysmic decisions are not in my nature. It’s actually easier if we all just go on as we are now—harried but happy—and save the tears for bigger, sadder days.

Yes, it’s an easy tearjerker, and the most cynical among us would say that it was conceived that way. But in “The Shrine Down the Hall, this weekend’s Times Magazine feature on the bedrooms left behind by kids who went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, had me from the first photo. What we see, in Ashley Gilbertson’s pictures, are bedrooms neatly maintained by parents whose children are never coming back. A lot of the kids are 19, 20, 21, and even though you know that means they’re young, it doesn’t hit you until you see the stuffed animals and bedsheets printed with NASCAR insignia. Some of them were in the sixth or seventh grade when this war started. My son’s first year has gone by in the blink of an eye; I’m sure a lot of these parents would say the same thing about their children’s lives, now cut short. Even if you believe (or once believed) that this war is necessary, it is a story that gives you permission to say “this has to end, and end soon.”

As an editor, I’d make only one criticism of the story. The photos are in black and white, which is stark but also makes them more arty and formal, sapping some of their humanity and poignancy. I craved the chance to see these rooms in color, to bring out the Americana: the faded colors of a cheap quilt that’s been laundered a hundred times, the tacky-in-a-good-way faux gold on those junior-varsity trophies. If anything could give these photos more power, it might have been that literal vividness.

Once again, I find myself at 35,000 feet, tear ducts wide open and ready to drain me of any last drops of moisture in my body. Today’s in-flight movie: The Blind Side, in which Oscar™ winner Sandra Bullock adopts a quasi-homeless black friend of her young son. Will I almost-cry today? Probably not—I don’t even have my headphones plugged in, which makes the melodrama easier to ignore.

Or maybe I will. I’m coming back from yet another work trip, and even though it lasted only ten days, this one feels longer than usual. While I was away, Sasha was sick for pretty much the first time in her life, and every night Jean was telling me stories of yellow gunk oozing from my little girl’s nose and eyes, of how she wasn’t eating, of how clingy she’d become. I could tell from Jean’s tone that she was exhausted from the childcare, and exasperated by my absence. Even with help from my mom, it was tough.

And okay, I don’t want to compare their ten days to mine, which I spent eating my way around Rome and the hill towns of Abruzzo, but it was tough for me, too. On previous trips, Sasha was younger, and although I might be gone for a week or two at a time, I was missing an unformed baby. Now Sasha is, if not quite a whole person, certainly a character—a human system of hazily articulated desires and unconsciously charming behaviors. Missing Sasha now is different because I like her: I want to be around her, play games and read with her, wipe the schmutz from her orifices, maybe even take her out to a bar one evening. (Kidding!)

At the same time, it all makes my travel—my work—that much less fun. Ten days of bucatini all’amatriciana and pecora alla callara (on someone else’s dime) may sound  exciting, but if I could’ve done it in half the time, I would’ve. That line I wrote about last week—“Io sono casalingo”—was truer than I knew, and as I waddled back to a friend’s apartment or a stone country house from each gut-busting meal, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of these people who were already home with their families. I guess this is what you call homesickness, a feeling I’m not too familiar with.

The even more frustrating thing is that my travel schedule is not slowing down. Two weeks from now, I’ll be back on the road, on another ridiculous adventure, with even more limited Skype and phone access to Sasha and Jean, who themselves won’t have my mother around to help them through the day. After that, who knows? I’ve been asked not to go anywhere for a while, but what can I do? This is my job. Like that of a fisherman or a soldier, work leads me far from home, imposing its responsibilities in place of the ones I’d rather fulfill, and what kind of father would I be if I didn’t work? Despite all the enlightened modern fatherhood we espouse here at DadWagon, I still feel compelled, on a genetic level, to be a provider, even if I’m only a minority earner.

But the truth is, Jean could support us, and I could stay home. I could become that guy I told the Italians I was, un vero uomo casalingo, doing the laundry, cooking dinner, wiping snot from his daughter’s nose and almost-tears from his own sad eyes.