Being away from home is the toughest part of life on the road for many frequent business travelers.

Chris Timar, who cleans oil storage tanks for a Houston company, has no home to return to. He's been traveling on business for five years, and the road is his home.

"I like to travel, and I enjoy my lifestyle," says Timar, 40, who is divorced and has no children. "I couldn't see being stuck in one place."

Timar's life is extreme — even by the standards of the most-hardened business travelers, many of whom spend more than 100 days a year on the road. Most own or rent a house or apartment. They have a town or a city they call home and find comfort in it.

Take Kevin Wilson. Wilson, a consultant who spent about 250 night in hotels last year, says the thought of living full-time on the road recently crossed his mind. But he likes "having roots — a home base." Wilson and his wife own a home in St. Louis.

Or Tevilla Riddell, a consultant who travels "so much that the hotels start to blur." She's also thought about a life like Timar lives "but couldn't do it," says Riddell, who spent more than 200 nights away from her Trophy Club, Texas, home last year. She needs hugs from her husband and the camaraderie of her friends and cats. "I need a nest," she says.

Timar's nest is always a temporary one. It's a hotel, motel or transient apartment near his latest job. His company forwards all his mail. His belongings are what he takes in bags, along with his tools for the job. He'll often leave behind what he doesn't need for his next stop.

Timar's current stop is Honolulu. He flew in Feb. 6 after 14 weeks in Linden, N.J. He's renting an apartment near Pearl Harbor.

He works for TriStar PetroServ, which employs about 100 workers and calls itself "the largest stand-alone tank cleaning and degassing company in the United States."

He is one of nine employees who supervise one- to nine-month projects across the country, says Troy Anderson, the company's division manager.

"Most spend about 350 days per year on the road — usually in a hotel — but they have homes and families and such," Anderson says. "Chris is unique because he chooses not to have a permanent place of residence."

Timar works 12 hours a day, six days a week, removing "the gunk" at the bottom of the huge storage tanks of oil companies and utilities. The tanks are 120 to 300 feet wide and 50 feet deep.

He must wear special fire-retardant clothing on the job. "We look like astronauts, and I like to tell people that I meet that I'm an astronaut," he says.

It's a job far from what his mother, Barbara, says she envisioned when Timar was growing up in Vermilion, Ohio, on the south shore of Lake Erie. "I thought he'd be a sports announcer," she says. "He knew every player on every team."

His nomadic ways also are far from the lives of his parents. Barbara and her husband, Les, who works for a telephone company, have lived in the same house for 40 years.

"Chris has a crazy lifestyle — very different than the one he had growing up," Barbara says. "It sounds harsh to say he's a road warrior without a home, but it's true."

In Vermilion, Timar had a house, a car, a boat and many other possessions. Today, he has no storage facilities. As he moves from city to city, the cupboard is pretty bare.

Timar checked out of the Swan Motel near Newark airport about two weeks ago with just two bags to check and two carry-ons for his trip to Hawai'i. They contained clothes, toiletries and tools.

He left behind a new suit, two winter coats, computer speakers, some frozen rib-eye steaks and tilapia.

"I don't think I'll need those clothes in Hawai'i," said Timar, who drove to Philadelphia to catch an inexpensive Southwest Airlines flight. "I pretty much only own the clothes on my back."

Timar flew and drove thousands of miles in 2008, with home ranging from Texas to Hawai'i to New Jersey.

There are drawbacks to the lifestyle, such as difficulty in maintaining social or personal relationships.

"You meet somebody, and then you're leaving the next week," says Timar, who stays at many extended-stay hotels with kitchens, laundry facilities and Internet service. "It's hard on a relationship."

He sometimes thinks about having a wife and a family, but "I'm too much of a little kid myself," he says. "I have a lot of freedom."

Timar has no plans to abandon his nomadic ways. He loves meeting and working with "new faces."

Every few months the wanderlust strikes. "I'm ready to move on," he said before checking out of his New Jersey motel. "A change of scenery will do me good," he says.

"And after a winter in New Jersey, Hawai'i is hard to beat."