The gentle squeaking and pumping sounds tell you that the windmill is doing its job; harnessing the relentlessly blowing wind to bring water up from the far depths of the earth, for all the thirsty livestock.

There is a whole field of them whirring around at the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock, Texas (including a giant 164-foot white Vestas wind turbine that powers the museum) plus a building crammed with over 100 historic windmills that you can walk around and read about.

I was struck by the engineering creativity and craftsmanship of these machines. I learned, for example, that the weird-looking windmill with the blades folded like a closed flower was actually a regular windmill that is folded like that when it is shut down.

There were absolutely enormous windmills that used to pull up enough water to service steam railroad engines.  There were small metal devices that perhaps brought up just enough water for some chickens, displayed right next to elaborate professionally manufactured windmills and then further down, some simple wooden handmade ones that would make MacGyver proud.

The museum also supports a WindSmith Academy:  a two-day school covering basic tenets of wind power.  Those who are interested in working in this growing profession (which is more and more important to the economy of western Texas) can check it out ahead of time through this course, and even climb up the tower of a 50 meter wind turbine at the end of class.

If you’re ever in Lubbock, this museum is well worth a stop. I truly enjoyed it.

The old man and old woman sitting next to me were having a fight.

Or so I surmised. I was on a flight from Shenzhen to Beijing. I was in the aisle seat and the old Chinese couple, in neat but well-worn clothing, occupied center and window.

It was generalized pandemonium upon boarding, with the flight attendants running to and fro, and business men talking simultaneously into three or four cell phones, and what seemed like a lot of unnecessary shouting. The flight attendants were uncommonly short – I saw one giving another a boost in order to shut the overheads.

Soon after take-off, the couple started speaking to one another in harsh tones. Although I understand no Chinese, this did not seem a case of one scolding the other –  judging from the self-righteous tone they both employed, they equally believed they were in the right.

However, when the food arrived, the fight was abandoned. They tucked into the food, including something glutinous and fluorescent pink which I tentatively poked at with my fork for a while. When they were done, the woman rummaged in the seat pocket, pulled out the barf bag and neatly packaged up the leftovers.  She opened her newspaper with satisfaction, her left elbow hovering in the space about three inches from my seat belt, and although I squirmed and coughed pointedly, none of my subtle hints encouraged her to retreat to her own space. I lived with her elbow until she finished the paper and handed it to her husband.

Later, I realized that they weren’t having a fight at all.

Chinese is a tonal language, and Cantonese in particular can sound quite harsh to the Western ear. It can sound like fighting even when someone’s actually saying, hey, what did you hear about the weather in Beijing? I was ready to categorize what I heard from my seatmates as fighting, though, because I needed to put things into categories that I understood at that particular moment.

I’d spent a number of days in Hong Kong, but had taken the ferry to Shenzhen to fly to Beijing since the fare was cheaper. Although Hong Kong is now officially part of the People’s Republic, I did not feel like I was actually in China until I disembarked in Shenzhen, and headed for the quite modern airport that was certainly not international. There were aquariums filled with beautiful tropical fish, but I could not find a western style toilet seat, nor could I buy a snack, since I only had Hong Kong dollars and not People’s Republic RMB, and the vendors did not take credit cards and I could not find an ATM.

Anyway, as that China Southern flight took off for Beijing, I thought to myself something that I often think when I’m entering into a place that feels hard to parse: “You’re really in it now.”

What I really should tell myself in such instances: treat any conclusion you draw right now as highly suspect.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the ground at JFK airport, in the first row of economy seats on a Royal Air Maroc flight to Casablanca. We were delayed for some time, and the in-flight crew were non-communicative as to what was causing the delay. Royal Air Maroc essentially operates without a functioning website, so there were no updates I could call up on my BlackBerry. But I was sufficiently distracted by watching some of the hubbub as my fellow passengers tried to find their seats.

What I was hearing, I realized, was an accent that sounded…Jamaican. Huh, Jamaican, I thought, how weird. Then I noticed that some of the passengers had dreadlocks, and certainly seemed to plausibly be from Jamaica.

What was happening here?

I considered the possibility that Moroccan simply sounded Jamaican to my ears, but that didn’t seem right. Or could there be some heretofore unknown connection between Morocco and Jamaica? I imagined writing about that, breaking the story, with some delight.  Then, I noticed that there were a number of teenagers rushing forward into First Class and then back again, all a-giggle and waving iPhones triumphantly. I peeked forward, and saw the flight crew posing for pictures with one of the First Class passengers. One of the teenagers settled herself into the seat across the aisle from me,  so I tapped her on the shoulder and asked who it was that was causing such a fuss. “Sean Paul,” she said, with a blushing smile. “Excuse me?” “Sean Paul,” she said firmly. I thanked her and used my BlackBerry to ascertain who this person was. A big whoop Jamaican reggae star, in case you also don’t know.

That explained a lot.

I often imagine what would happen if I didn’t find out that Sean Paul was aboard that flight, if I had decided to simply believe that I’d uncovered a new era of Jamaicans taking their holidays in Morocco…I could have told that story over drinks in Marrakesh, regaled people with “…and you’ll never believe!” when I returned to New York.

Also, it would have tempting, had I been writing a story about the Shenzhen airport from the airport, to advise ladies who would prefer not to deal with a squatter to hold it in until they boarded the plane –  but I happened to spot a western-style toilet seat lurking behind an ajar door on a bathroom flagged with a handicapped sign and so I overwrote my first observation, that there were no toilet seats to be found in Shenzhen airport, with better information.

The problem with traveling in a place that’s unfamiliar is that we’re so often entirely clueless about what’s actually happening – but we don’t realize how lost we are.

Of course, it’s a human tendency to interpret our observations of the current moment through the lens of our past experience, a lens whose glass was milled through experiences formed by our own culture. I don’t think this is a problem, necessarily, I think it’s something we have to do in order to function. The problem only comes when we cling to our initial interpretations tightly, when we’re unaware that we’re squinting through a distorting lens.

I think of that old Chinese couple often —  in fact, that’s one of the stories when I’m describing my confusion during what was my first trip to China – isn’t it funny that they were just having a conversation, and I thought they were having a spat?

But here’s the thing I realize now: they could have been fighting. After all, I don’t speak Chinese.

I really have no idea.

The epiphany came during a nighttime drive; I crested a rise just south of Sweetwater, Texas and saw a bunch of eerie blinking red lights all across the horizon.

Massive airport runway?

A bazillion cell phone towers?

Aliens?

No, it was the red lights for hundreds of wind turbines on the wind farms that are spread across this section of the Panhandle Plains.

At that moment – free of any responsibilities other than pondering red lights – I felt more relaxed than I have felt in months, and I was nowhere near a beach, a lake, a mountaintop, a drink with an umbrella in it or any of the other typical mental vacation images.

That’s when it hit me: a vacation is a state of mind, not a particular location.

The process of getting ready to back out of the driveway is part of the vacation. It put me in a getaway mindset to simply turn on my email Out of Office (an anachronistic feature when so many of us can access email on our phones if we have to.) I needed to do that because unless I publicly announce, “Hey everyone, leave me alone for a day or so!” then I am compelled to continue shoveling out the IN box all day every day. People expect it, and they should; I’m a freelancer and an entrepreneur and those are the breaks of the “untethered to an office” lifestyle.

The problem is, without a real office door to shut, without co-workers or assistants to hand my work to, there is no vacation. There is no chance to vacate my poor noggin and let it rest.

You must make your own open spaces in your life, when your head can breathe, and until now I have failed miserably to do that.

It took a long drive to Sweetwater (which I will not insult by calling it the “middle of nowhere,” but many will look at it that way) to show me that the right mindset, not some brochure-ish destination, is what lets my head breathe and go on vacation.

Think I’ll go sit and stare at turbines for awhile….

Mary Youngblood often listens to the wind. She seeks out how it stirs the grass, how it whistles and whispers through rocks, how it moves across the waters. Through those sounds, she finds inspiration to write her own music.

Her instruments of choice are Native American wooden flutes, themselves riders of wind and expressions of breath. It took Youngblood awhile to make her way to the instruments which have become the source of her deepest expression. Classical piano lessons as a child, garage band jamming on guitar, and high school band participation on the flute all helped pave the way. A family move in the middle of the school year led to that high school band encounter with the flute: it was the only instrument available, the one no one wanted to play. “I really wanted to be in the band, so I said okay, I’ll play it! That was how I became involved, and when I look back, I see the destiny in it,” Youngblood said. “But at the time, no — there was just no other instrument left.”

That led her to training on the classical flute, and eventually to exploration of Native flutes. There was surprise in store there. “It wasn’t common for women to play the flute in Native culture,” she said. “For a long time it was reserved for men, by tradition, but I really didn’t know that when I started playing. People started telling me you’re not supposed to be doing that, and it caused quite a stir. I said, you know what, I’m doing it!”

Youngblood’s musical influences are varied. “I grew up listening to a lot of folk music, I really loved James Taylor. I write songs now for guitar and vocals and they’re very much like ballads. I really love female vocals. I love Joanne Shenandoah, Ella Fitzgerald, Karen Carpenter,” she said, pointing out that her friend Shenandoah has said she wants her voice to sound like a flute when she sings.

Youngblood’s tribal background is diverse too. In her family the far points of Native America join: her mother was of the Aleut tribe, from Alaska, and her dad was Native also, from the Seminole tribe of Florida. They met when her father was sent on a Navy posting to Seattle, where her tribe had sent her mother to a government school.

Drawing on all these elements, Youngblood’s unique view of the world through her music is found on albums including the Grammy winning Dance With the Wind, Native American award winning Feed the Fire,the soundtrack for the Emmy winning film Sacajawea, and collaborative projects including Prayer for Peace.

She still finds the same joy in jamming with other musicians as she did in her garage band days. That continues to be a source of inspiration, and so does the natural world. In Northern California where she now lives “I like to go hiking and take flutes and rattles and my recorder with me. Sometimes I go with my percussionist and we drive two hours and then hike an hour back in. somewhere by the river,” Youngblood said “To me that’s really inspirational. I like to just sit out there and play my flutes, and come up with ideas I haven’t heard before.”

Eight months ago I woke up to a cup of coffee, as usual, and opened an email that informed me that I’d won a dream vacation, which was not so usual, at least in the sense that it was a legitimate email and wasn’t sent by Spam Bot 3000.

For the next four months my girlfriend and I mapped out that dream vacation. Honestly, we were almost in a state of bashful embarrassment about the whole thing; we’d been chosen, 1 out of 20,000 odd entries, to do something most people will only, well, dream of having the opportunity to do. How do you tell colleagues, friends, even family that you won a blank travel check for $10,000, no strings attached (except for the taxes), without sounding like a total schmuck?

Most people are of course happy for you. But when a coworker has two weeks of vacation all year, and can’t afford to go too far from home, I don’t find it especially comfortable breaking the news that I’ll be off to Sri Lanka, then to the Maldives, then to South Africa, and that I’ll see them when I get back in five weeks.

Or when your sister is scrimping and scrounging to save up for a down payment on a condo, so that she can move her family out of her mother-in-law’s house and into their own home, and a long vacation is exactly what she needs but the last thing that she can afford, calling her up and saying “Hey sis, guess what? I won a dream vacation, isn’t that swell?” is awkward at best, no matter how you frame it or tiptoe around it.

Which isn’t to say those four months were filled with guilt, of course.

The magic of possibility was intoxicating; the freedom to spin the globe, close my eyes, and put my finger down on a random spot and actually go there—I used to do this regularly as a starry-eyed kid—was almost overwhelming.

In the end, somewhat randomly, we stretched those contest dollars as far as we could, and booked an open-jaw ticket inbound to Colombo, Sri Lanka, and outbound from Cape Town, South Africa. In between, five weeks of travel that took us to fantastical places we thought we might never see, places where we met the kind of warm-hearted—and, oftentimes, bizarro—people that always help make traveling such a transformational experience; people like Kumar in Kandy, Mrs. Fonseka in Colombo, Natasha in Johannesburg, and Vanessa and Marco in Kruger, by way of California. People we’ll never forget.

We left three months ago; two months ago we came home to Brooklyn, a hundred or so pages filled in our journals, thousands of pictures crammed onto memory cards, countless memories ping-ponging around in heads still spinning from good fortune and good times on the road.

In those days and weeks immediately following our return, it felt like it was all just a dream: were we really just walking through the African bush tracking elephants and rhinos? Did we really ride in the same train on the same track on the same route between Galle and Colombo that Paul Theroux described in a particularly moving chapter of The Great Railway Bazaar?

As time continues to relentlessly separate us from the newness of that adventure, these feelings of incredulity become only more exasperated. Inevitably, exacting details of our two days in Nuwara Eliya, our rooftop dinners in Galle, our blank-slate days in Goyambokka melt into broad brushstrokes and highlight reels. Tightly though we cling to these memories, the hands of time pound on them, pound on them, pound on them, wearing them down like ocean waters on a block of granite, chipping away, washing away, rounding sharp edges into blunt curves.

That’s why we treasure our travel journals as much as we treasure anything.

On those pages, the words are locked in defiance of time’s passage; they don’t age, they don’t blur. That’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past few years, to write, write, write. I wish I’d kept more detailed and dedicated journals since I became fully, happily, consumed by the allure of life abroad, and of aimless travel, some years ago now. As painful as it sometimes is, and as tired as I oftentimes am, I must write something, anything, every day in that journal; technically, I should be writing something everyday period, traveling or not, but that’s another story on another topic.

I’ve shoe-gazed here about my stroke of dream-vacation luck before; I might very well write about it again. I’ll continue to consult that journal, and to the best of my ability continue to recreate those experiences in this space and, editors willing, elsewhere.

There’s a certain pressure that comes with that job, one that does, admittedly, get the best of me at times. It’s more than the brainstorming and the pitching and the querying and the outlining and trying to deliver a strong piece: it’s the pressure of doing the places, the people, and the memories the justice they so deserve.

That’s my only real prescription for success. And, really, that’s every writer’s only real measure for success, isn’t it?