I was also a professor at a liberal arts college.
Your mileage may vary a lot depending what school you are at, but here were the positives and negatives I came across:
Positives: Some schedule flexibility during the academic year, lots of opportunities to interact with students, sabbaticals every few years, no direct supervisor, not a great deal of pressure to publish but lots of encouragement to do so, little pressure to bring in grants, interesting work, unscheduled time over the summer and over breaks, total job security if you get tenure, probably family-friendly after you are tenured, some conference travel, freedom to do research on what you want, society respects academics, nice university facilities (gym, pool, library, etc.)
Negatives: Not as much schedule flexibility during the academic year as you'd think, two-body problems, can't actually take advantage of the sabbatical and travel if you are married or have kids (unless you are married to another professor), very low salary relative to non-academic jobs, brutal teaching load, no TAs so lots of mindless grading, lots of focus on teaching evaluations and constant feeling of providing customer service, mostly introductory classes for engineers/pre-meds, very rural area, entitled students from wealthy families, lots and lots of office hours required, inter and intra departmental politics, no sick leave (if you get sick, other professors cover your classes and you spend the rest of the year paying them back), no direct supervisor but you need to please every tenured person in the department, little time to do research during the academic year and planning courses cuts into summer too, no real "vacation" when you are totally free, awkwardness of running into students at all university facilities (gym, pool, dining halls), very hard to move to another institution.
Overall it wasn't for me. I was really surprised; I expected to love it, but I didn't; I basically felt like a high school teacher. Between teaching multiple lectures a day, office hours, grading, and preparing the next day's lectures, I was frequently working 14 hour days and had no weekends to speak of. The worst was when the college would schedule some outreach event at 8 a.m. on a weekend, and after working hard all week I would have to be there as part of the "service" component of my tenure evaluation. There was a ton of bureaucracy too, with constant meetings to revise a curriculum that I thought was perfectly fine.
To be fair, I think if I had stayed longer and repeated more courses, the workload would have dropped. But I don't think it would have dropped enough to make it worth living where I didn't want to live and in a place that caused two-body problems for me. I liked teaching but I didn't want to be doing it constantly--when you do research, you gain in terms of professional reputation and career development, but time you spend teaching is really pure service. To me that got frustrating after some time--I wanted to do something for my own career development, not just train future doctors to pass the MCAT.
Ultimately I left for industry where I work 40 hour weeks, have time for my family, and can save enough money to feel comfortable. I have a boss and little freedom on what I work on, but when I am sick I can actually take sick leave, which is a great relief. I remember that there were people at my college who were in permanent long-distance marriages, etc. It just blew my mind that they would make that sort of sacrifice to do a job that honestly was, at best, just okay. I wonder if they would do that if they knew what else was out there.
When I was making my "stay or go" decision, I found that many if not most of the professors in my department had considered leaving academia at one point or another, which is surprising given that postdocs consider tenure track positions the Holy Grail. Ultimately they all stayed--less out of love than out of inertia, for family reasons, because they didn't want to give up the tenure they spent seven years earning, and probably from some fear of not being able to survive outside academia after years of teaching the same classes. Nobody was very surprised when I left, and I suspect more than one person envied me.
