Does someone who is really not a research wizard have any good reason to be doing this? No, but he really wants to be somewhere else, and every city within teleport range feels too familiar.

It turns out there's a way to strip out all but the most essential components of plane shift and get it down to a 4th-circle spell. He had to tear off the entire searching and navigation structure, other than a basic safety test to not drop you somewhere that just kills you. It, for some reason, doesn't work on the material, so he has to get a rope trick ready to work on it. It's also not at all a good idea to use, because there is absolutely no telling where an untargeted plane shift takes you. But it's a wonder. A 7th circle spell stripped down to a 4th circle, this kind of thing seems like it really shouldn't be possible.

(It really isn't that surprising. Many, many wizards with Desnan tendencies end up reinventing some version of Anywhere but Here. But, without a spell to return home, they're lost out in the Great Beyond and so the spell doesn't get shared, and the next wizard to figure it out thinks he's discovered something novel.)

Anyway, the spell fired as he was putting the structure together, as unstable and experimental spells sometimes do. To anywhere he goes.