I’m a little tightly-wound. I don’t mind being an intense person (and hey, after 40+ years, it ain’t gonna change now) but sometimes, I get on my own last nerve.

As a blogger and Web-connected person, every place I visit is a potential blog post, Facebook Wall note or could be the subject of a photo for Flickr or TwitPic.  My brain is constantly processing content ideas, and it is difficult for me to turn it off. It is how I am wired.

It’s wonderful when it is energizing, it is not when it is draining. After a recent personal bout with shingles, I knew I needed to find travel moments when I can back off a bit, not pile it on.

I found some of that respite while looking for birds, mostly because I am not a birder so I can’t get all hyper about it.

While driving to Houston recently to research two articles I’m  writing for Texas Highways magazine, I looked on the map for some fun road trip diversions. Let me tell you, there are stretches of Texas where the entertainment pickings are SLIM, and this is one of them.

There was a green blob on the map about 60 miles southwest of Houston labeled “Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge (NWR.)”  I’d seen pictures of these birds and thought they looked impressive, but knew nothing about them.

Time for a detour.

“Miles and miles of miles and miles.” That’s how my Dad used to describe the middle of nowhere on our road trips. I drove into the NWR and meandered for a bit, leaving a cloud of road dust behind me in the incessant wind.

I learned that there are only 50 of the endangered Attwater’s birds in the wild at the NWR;  no wonder I never saw any. Combined with 40 or so in two other Texas preserves and 182 in captivity, that’s only 272 birds total. There used to be around a million, on six million acres of coastal prairie (the NWR is almost 10,000 acres of protected habitat.)

In the Visitor’s Center, I looked at videos about the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken; they included the male’s distinctive mating dance when he puffs out his red “cheeks,” stomps rapidly and “booms,” or makes a sound like blowing across the top of an open bottle.

A stroll down some of the NWR marked trails brought me out into the prairie, where I could hear all sorts of birds.  There’s a birder’s species checklist for the real enthusiasts – “Plovers and Lapwings,” “Stilts and Avocets,” “Rails, Gallinules and Coots” and my personal favorite, “Goatsuckers.”

Most importantly, I was reminded that there are things to do and learn even out in “the middle of nowhere.” There are moments when you can simply be. Moments when the most important thing to do is play with the Macro setting on your camera to capture an unexpected wild raspberry.

Even though I never saw one, I thank the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken for slowing me (and my pulse rate) way down. More of my travels need to be like that, and I’ll bet yours do, too.  In the US, visit the National Wildlife Refuge System online, then include that NWR detour on your travels.

(Note: If you’d like to help save these birds from extinction, take a look at the Adopt-A-Prairie-Chicken program or the Nature Conservancy’s Attwater’s Prairie Chicken habitat preservation efforts.)

If you like a good fiction feast, and are a wilderness fan, and you haven’t read Nevada Barr yet, I pity you. And I recommend you get started. Borderline, just released in April, is mystery author Nevada Barr’s 18th book, and 15th in the bestselling Anna Pigeon series.

Anna Pigeon is a feisty, independent, nature-loving, sometimes knife- or gun-wielding U.S. National Park ranger who, at the beginning of the book series, uses alcohol and her deep love of the wilderness to overcome the heartbreak of losing her young husband to a New York City taxi cab. In Track of the Cat, the first in the series, she is hunting poachers and murderers (to her mind, killers of innocent animals might be more evil) in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. In this most recent book, she’s back in Texas, this time to little-known Big Bend National Park, taking a rafting vacation down the Rio Grande with her new husband and trying to recover from the trauma of having killed a man (an evil, twisted jerk, but still, she killed a guy) in the previous book.

Nevada Barr is an excellent, nearly flawless writer, and her skill gives her books the backbone and structure they need to become great reads. I’ve read every single one of the Anna Pigeon mysteries, and am always impressed with the dedication Barr puts into her craft. Top that with a gutsy, likeable, flawed character like Anna Pigeon, and it’s no wonder the books have become bestsellers.

But it’s Barr’s intimate knowledge of and love for the wilderness her books are set in that make them great bestselling mysteries. Barr spent many years as a park ranger herself, at Isle Royale in Michigan, Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and then on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi — where three of her best books are coincidentally set. The passages on natural world — the heat of the Texas desert in Track of the Cat, the bone-deep freeze of Isle Royale in Winter Study, the living decay found on Ellis Island in Liberty Island — are seamlessly woven into the action and narrative, and go beyond description to make the reader feel, see, and smell through Anna Pigeon’s eyes.

Set in a park encompassing part of the Rio Grande and the U.S. border with Mexico, Borderline deals with issues of immigration, marital disjointedness, motherhood, and politics, in addition to taking readers to a brand-new park with our favorite National Park ranger. The whitewater rafting trip turns into a disaster — Anna saves a cow and a baby, in that order, but a lot of other people die. Although it’s not her job, this time, to find answers, she can’t help herself, even with an apprehensive new husband watching protectively over her shoulder. And, as usual, the answers to what’s wrong in this small, beautiful world come down to power and money: in other words, people. Anne Pigeon is less comfortable with humans than with trees and cats, which is perhaps what makes me sympathize so deeply with her character and her life.

If you want to live and breathe America’s National Parks, either before a trip to one or instead of, chuck your guidebook aside and pick up a Nevada Barr mystery. Nowhere else can you get such a deep look into the vibrant, breathing ordered chaos of the natural world.

I recommend you start with Track of the Cat, the first in the series. Also, The Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, has posted a 37-minute Q & A talk with Nevada Barr from her book tour last month. You can access it on her home page. She’s a gracious, eloquent, funny speaker, and talks a bit both about the writing process and about her visit to Big Bend National Park while researching the book.

This little gem was found on a recent trip to Timaru, 2 hours south of Christchurch.

The Aigantighe Art Museum is the South Island’s third largest public art museum and is home to an eclectic collection of works from sixteenth century to present day including New Zealand artists such as Goldie, McCahon, and Hodgkins.

The Edwardian House that holds this collection was built in 1908 by Alexander and Helen Grant, Scottish immigrants, as a retirement home. Aigantighe means ‘at home’ in Scottish Gaelic and is pronounced ‘egg and tie’. It was gifted to the city of Timaru and formally opened as an art gallery in 1956.

Beside the paintings and the architecture, another reason to visit Aigantighe is it’s thought provoking International Sculpture Garden.

Treehugger has created a globetrotters green gift guide full of all sorts of useful travel items.

news-press.com offers a unique way of viewing a destination with their article  Take tour of Florida eco-systems from the treetops.

Over 500 hotels have self-audited their greenness and earned Eco-leaf rating with  iStayGreen.org’s online self-audit.

Nature Photography offers some green tips with Ten Things You Can Do for More Eco-Friendly Photography

MNN features Los Angeles as their green destination of the week.

Washington, D.C., can take you from the completely eclectic to grounded down-to-earth in no time flat. Take this piece: one of several hulking red metal constructions spaced out around the publicly owned parks leading to the National Mall, it could clash or scream against the landscape. But, set as it is near a fountain where children are running around and adults are scarfing salads and sandwiches under some generous tree foliage, it seems to fit right in. There is something about the way this sculpture is plopped down, along with several other pieces of outdoor art, seemingly at random, that gives visitors a gentle introduction both to the massiveness of the National Mall and the sheer weirdness of the Hishhorn Museum of modern and contemporary art.

When we visited D.C., the Hirshhorn was dedicating an entire floor to the work of artist Louise Bourgeois. The exhibition is centered around huge spider sculptures that evoke a “creepy fascination.” They’re punctuated by “Arch of Hysteria,” a life-size bronze sculpture of a skinny human arched backwards into a near-circle. The artist says this piece, which at first glance reminded me of some of the more difficult yoga poses I’ve attempted, is meant to evoke the feeling of “bending over backwards,” the stress of always trying to do your best.

That idea fit right in with this quote from Louise Bourgeois: “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.” Well said.

I usually have to enter a modern or contemporary art museum with a completely blank mind, no assumptions. Because the truth is I really don’t get it. I don’t get the art, the artists, the point, or the attraction. But every now and then something speaks to me, tapping an inner bell of recognition (of what? who knows) or evoking a laugh of delight. The latter was the case with Juan Muñoz’s “Last Conversation Piece,” (pictured here), set just outside the museum’s entrance. A miracle of movement, it hints at forthcoming violence, or the possibility of peace. I wonder what they’re saying to each other, what prompted the confrontation among these creatures.

So you go from weird, to mundane but pleasant at the National Portrait Gallery (which is enormous and requires much more time than anyone has in a given afternoon), where the most popular rooms are the wide-open spaces given over to portraits of all the U.S. presidents. It’s a pretty remarkable collection, the faces of these men always fascinating and some of the more recent art unexpected, like the life-size de Kooning piece of John F. Kennedy and riveting images of a young Abraham Lincoln.

I’m looking forward, however, to seeing a woman up there someday.

And from the pleasantly mundane to the down-to-earth at the National Zoo. I love it that we have a National Zoo. When you have this exchange – “And it’s free!” “No, it isn’t. We pay for it with our tax dollars.” – you’re given a nice little uplift of democracy. Something that reminds you that the power still does lie in the people, even if we choose to fritter it away. Which is nice, because I’ve always been conflicted about zoos and always will be. All those gorgeous animals stuck in cages, no matter how large or open-aired.

Unfortunately, none looked sadder than the zoo’s biggest success stories: two adult giant pandas and their cub. The outdoor space given to the three awe-inspiring creatures is gracious, with plenty of room for privacy, but we happened upon them when they were inside during feeding time, with hundreds of tourists (yes, me, too) snapping photos through mucky glass. With only about 1600 wild giant pandas left in China, though, who can criticize?

The National Zoo’s outdoor orangutan cables (set up high above visitors’ heads for the delightful long-armed creatures to swing on), and the new boardwalk bridge for the elephants being built throughout the park speak volumes for care and conservation of animals in captivity. Nice to know my tax dollars are going to something worthwhile.

But what’s really cool are the play spaces for children: in addition to the house-sized pizza puzzle (with bouncy bits and climby bits and all bits in between) and a petting zoo, the prairie dogs have graciously allowed a kid-sized prairie dog maze to be built next to their habitat. After a day of mind-bending museums, scrambling through its tunnels can bring both you and your kid right back to earth.