Sure, this can lead to a lower level of anxiety because you have a better idea of what to expect in general, even if it's a place you've never been. Knowing the routines and general ins and outs of foreign travel can be handy and tend to be the same wherever you go, so being a seasoned travel vet can make it easier.
But the bigger impact seems to be that it is much harder to be 'wowwed' by what you see when you get there. That's not at all to say that you don't still enjoy and appreciate your destination. Rather, it's just that in some of my earlier travels, there was often this feeling of absolutely giddy fascination, born sometimes simply out of the shock of "being there" as much as by the sites to be seen.
I haven't really had that feeling much since I left, which has been a bit of a surprise. I realized on Day 1 here in Ireland, while Bill and I were driving through the rolling Clare countryside back to his school that, this being my third trip to Ireland, the countryside was no less beautiful, but didn't have this "wowwww... cooooool" effect on me that it had previously had. A quiet, warm smile of appreciation still crept across my face, but the adrenaline rush that might have accompanied it in the past was gone.
Even on seeing completely new places like Italy, Germany and France for the first time, those sorts of feelings were diminished some. It's been a bit sad in a way that seeing such distant and foreign places no longer gives quite the same level it once did.
But here's something to chew on for a bit:
"Which is worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored?" - Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent
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