I enjoyed the earlier lessons - when I could turn up, fly some handling exercises with the instructor for an hour and go home.
Know a chap at my airfield who has his PPL for several years now and regularly does just this (on his own), rarely going beyond visual distance from the airfield. As already observed in previous posts, when you have your PPL, a) you can decide whether you just want to be up in the air without actually going anywhere (with minimum preparation hassle except for the technical preflight checks), b) navigation will become much less of a stressful burden and even when going someplace, "looking out the window and really appreciating what you're doing" will soon become the usual state of affairs.