Thoughts on Visiting?

Ethan's post below, and some of the comments, suggest that, in the spirit of many of our past posts discussing various aspects of law teaching, it might be instructive to open up a discussion on the phenomenon of professorial visits at law schools.  As the comments to Ethan's post suggest, most of the regular bloggers on this site will be taking the show on the road for at least part of next year.  (Another testament to the power of blogging -- our home institutions want us elsewhere!)  Some have already visited before, for others it's their first time -- and many of our professional readers have certainly visited and/or moved between institutions.  So perhaps, as with our previous posts on the meat market and other aspects of life in law teaching, we can serve as a forum and clearinghouse for information on the visiting process, a practice about which I suspect that many prawfs lack hard knowledge and rely on loose talk, even if they've done it themselves.

Here are some questions on which I'd be eager to hear semi- or fully-informed views:

* What are the virtues of visiting?

* How does one go about landing visiting opportunities?

* What are the relative virtues of "podium-filling" vs. "look-see" visits, and how often does the former effectively turn into the latter?

* What are various schools' policies on "look-see" visits, ie. offer on the spot vs. refusal to consider until after the visitor has gone?

* How does one make the most of a visit?  What obvious or not-so-obvious aspects of protocol would our experienced readers recommend that a visitor observe? 

* What are the drawbacks of visiting -- especially, to be unsparing about it, for junior faculty?

Comments, additional questions, and amusing/horrifying anecdotes are welcome.  Keep in mind that I'm not asking for names of visitors or institutions or other sensitive or privately held information.  I'd rather pool information than share gossip, just this once.  Anonymous posts accepted, albeit commenters' actual names are always preferred.

UPDATE:  Those interested in this topic should definitely also consult a couple of superb posts by Christine Hurt at the Conglomerate, here and here.  One of the commenters to Christine's second post notes that "this is one of those posts where lots of people are reading but not many will comment."  True, for understandable reasons, and I was slightly leery about posting, but I think that's the point: this is a topic lots of professors are interested in and no one wants to talk about or even acknowledge, which increases the likelihood that people will possess incomplete or bad information.  It ought to be possible, perhaps with the assistance of anonymous comments, to pool information about something that happens every year at pretty well every law school, but maybe I'm being overoptimistic here.  Folks who want to share information quietly via email are therefore welcome to do so, and I'll cull the best bits.