I travel 25% - 50%, but there is no "typical" for me, it's basically as-needed to accomplish my job. Sometimes it's an out and back car trip, no overnight, sometimes it's a multileg 4 day trip. Sometimes the travel is to cool places like Portland, Chicago, Austin. I've also spent many a night in Bumfuck, USA in sketchy hotels (Cow Palace motel in Lamar, CO anyone?). I've had this job before and after having a child (we've had a pet for a while). It's always been a mixed bag, but after-kid the mix has been more to the negative side, with more negative as she's gotten older. When I'm not travelling, I work from home, though for the first couple of years it was from an office. Travel and working from home both have their pros and cons.
Pros:
I keep the miles, so I've enjoyed many free flights, hotel stays and rental cars on vacation
The occasional break in the home routine can be nice
When the travel is to cool places, it's enjoyable
Cons:
With a child, she's old enough now to realize that I'm gone. This absolutely kills me.
You grow to dread going to the airport, getting on a plane, etc. In fact, travel for vacations becomes a drag and source of stress. To quote an acquaintance of mine in a similar situation "At this point, every time I start to drive to DIA I get queasy".
When the travel is not to cool places, it sucks and a resentment toward your employer slowly starts to build and fester.
Edit - A lot also depends on how your employer administers the travel. In our company the pendulum has swung from good but not great experience to total suck then back to good but not great. These swings have correlated to the following developments:
1. At first, the company was fairly young and not burdened by process or CYA-ness. You booked your own travel through expedia or southwest.com or wherever you could find the best deals and the most convenience. No questions were asked, it was a total honor system and to my knowledge never abused (egregiously). On the con side, filing expense reports was a 4-hour soul-killing nightmare of keeping / scanning receipts and filling in an arcane spreadsheet.
2. The company hires AMEX to run our travel and later our expenses. Total suck. This is the sort of move that gets made when a company starts to focus more on making the lives of administrators and back office people easier and less on clearing a path for those out making stuff happen. No formal spending guidelines are instituted, but AMEX really sucks from the user side and they started enforcing a two-week booking limit where you really get the stinkeye if travel is booked without pre-clearing it within two weeks of departure. I note immediately that prices on AMEX are way higher than what we could get booking on our own, so my suspicion is that this is really about control and accountability rather than efficient use of company dollars, but fine. I've also noted zero cost difference between a flight booked 15 days in advance and one booked 13 days in advance. Again, fine. Just don't be surprised when you come to me and ask how we can regain the entrepreneurial spirit of the good old days and "eliminate travel procedure" is one of the first things I say. Expense report filing enters a new phase of hell as we're still expected to keep all receipts, the AMEX interface both on the web and mobile is balky / slow / counter-intuitive and worse, we get to pay interest and late fees out of pocket if we don't file on time. This would be fine if I could use my own card and pay the reasonable fees that come with not being part of a captive market, but we use JPM cards and they come with absurd fees if you pay late.
3. Things get somewhat better as our AMEX process slowly improves. Now the only receipts we have to keep are hotels, reducing time and pain level on the expense report process. After much sturm und drang, (and probably some shouting and threatening) the company decides that employees will not be responsible for late fees and interest on corporate cards, but managers will be accountable for their peoples' timeliness on expense reports.