Seems we often end up with different reasons; different desires. In retrospect, I think quite a few of my desires to "get away" had their roots in not having great coping skills when it came to stress and difficulties... I'd get easily overwhelmed, and then the task ahead of me would seem insurmountable.
Oddly enough, the idea of having to survive on the streets, or living "in digs" in a strange town caused me far less anxiety than the thought of having to deal with bully bosses in dead-end jobs that earned me less than I need to pay my rent on some swank apartment.
It is quite interesting to look back and think about how we rationalized things. Many times we can obviously feel the pain of our current situation and look to the unknown with dreams of something better. In your last move, you actually found something better, but not necessarily in the 'place' but because of what you did to your mind. More often than not, people move towards a dream and then find it just as difficult or worse because they now need to start all over from scratch without having resolved the real issues.
This is actually a great topic because there is so much one can learn through these kinds of discussions. The mind is kind of a strange place because one can never really tell if it is real or simply a manifestation of our imaginations that we are contemplating about. For example, a dream is real to us until we wake up and are subjected to new sensory input that questions the validity of the dream. In the same way, we can daydream or even deliberately fool ourselves because that is what we want to believe as truth.
If we wish to take it a step farther, what about the idea of believing in something and then MAKING it happen? There has been much said about creating your own reality. Are we really living in a matrix-like world where we do actually dream our lives into existence?