There’s a scientific explanation for why the car trip home feels shorter than the car trip away.

This is something you might not have noticed until you’ve thought about it. If you’ve ever gone on a trip to the beach/lake, for example, you might have realized that the trip home didn’t feel as long as the trip there. 

Like many, you might be chalking up the perceived longer wait to get there to your high expectations, and because that you look forward to it and think about it so much the wait seems longer. 

If so, you likely also assumed that it was simply being tired from the activities and lack of the same kind of anticipation that made the trip home feel shorter. While those are theoretically true, there is something else that plays a much bigger role in the perceived time difference. 

It has to do with a bias in time perception due to how we spatially encode destinations. In short, because home is very familiar, it has a rich mental representation. That makes home feel like a larger geographical area than the less mentally familiar destination. This presents a sort of skewered perception in feelings of trip progress. 

The familiarity makes arriving in areas close to the home feel like the destination has already been reached. The lack of familiarity (on the same level) with the destination when leaving home leaves the mind to perceive “arrival” only when sitting at the physical spot. 

But of course the most efficient way to shorten the amount of time perceived on a trip is simply falling asleep in the car. Unless you’re driving. 

(Source)