I'm a medievalist, and travel is very important for my research because it's the only way I can access some of the things I study, and the only way I can talk with others in my field.

My project focuses on archaeology in sixth century England, and (as you can imagine) almost all the artifacts on which I base my work are in British museums. There's often a lot published on the objects, and much (though not all) of this material can be gotten by my amazing interlibrary loan librarians. But some things simply don't exist outside of the UK, and I have to go there to read / study / examine them.

My project is unusual in that so much of my data is already published in some form (mostly, archaeological site reports). Some historians are lucky (or unlucky) enough to work entirely from texts that have been well edited and published (if you study, for example, Tacitus' portrayal of the Germanic barbarians, you can get most of your primary sources from any good library). But most historians rely on primary sources that aren't published - archived collections of letters, legal records, or old government documents, medieval manuscripts that have never been digitized, inscriptions that haven't been catalogued and are in some museum's basement, etc. One of my colleagues is going to be visiting several hospitals in a few months to look at 100-year-old records of some of their patients. These kinds of archival sources are basically impossible to gather without traveling, and as a consequence archival research is one of the most important parts of most historians' research processes.

Paying for this research can be tough. I spend a lot of my time writing grants. I'm a grad student, so some of this funding is from my grad school, some is from organizations (like the Medieval academy of America) that fund exciting projects by medievalist grad students. Some is from big national grants like the SSRC IDRF, the CLIR Mellon, or Fulbright. Grant writing is exhausting, is very competitive (everyone wants free money), takes a ton of time, but - when successful - makes it possible to string together enough money to get to the archives and make a project happen. I'm going to England soon for the second time for my doctoral project, and will be visiting a number of tiny archives and collections and taking many frantic notes and photos before my funding runs out and I have to come back to my teaching job in the fall. Rinse and repeat, that's the dream if you can get the institutional and financial support to make it work.

The other advantage of travel, beyond tracking down your primary sources, is networking. Most of us don't live next to the other experts in our field, and while email makes it a lot easier to stay in touch with the wider community, the best way to make contacts and stay on top of the current conversation in whatever thing you study is to travel to conferences, meet other scholars, and chat over coffee or a few beers. I can read all about Anglo-Saxon England in journals until my eyes fall out, but the articles I'm reading are already a year old by the time I get them (at best). To know what's really going on, I have to go to conferences and visit universities where my fellow scholars are working to be part of the leading edge of the conversation. This means a lot of travel (and expense), and again means lots of time spent applying for travel funding and submitting pieces of my own ongoing research so I can co tribute to the ongoing conversation.

If you land one of those elusive tenure track jobs, you get more institutional support to travel, and you qualify to apply for bigger grants that allow you to undertake further archival research, or to travel to libraries larger than that of your home institution for a semester or year of research. My supervisor just returned from a year long fellowship; it was a competitive application, and -- project was judged to be one of the more exciting to throw money at. This process of attempting to convince funding bodies to send you to libraries or archives never ends.

So, how much is travel a part of the life of a professional historian? In terms of actual time, I usually only go to one conference per semester; occasionally two and rarely more (I can't abandon my students much more than that during the semester!). I'll have spent at least five months in the UK before I've finished what will be a minimum of six years in grad school (more than five months, if I get lucky and win a big grant - but that's a long shot). That's not a lot in terms of days away from home. But it's more than many jobs, and more importantly it's absolutely crucial for my research and participation in the larger scholarly community. So yes, travel is a big part of the job.