You have to stop walking, breathe deeply and let the moment ooze into your brain.

A building or monument that had previously been part of your travel dreams is now right in front of you. It actually exists. Real people work in it, stroll past every day, purse their lips in annoyance at the tourists who are so excited to touch it.

“I’m really here!” you think, a bit sheepishly because it is certainly stating the obvious.

Or maybe, like me, your whole brain is vibrating with “Squeeeee!”

It’s discombobulating to realize that yes, that really IS the Leaning Tower of Pisa (and wow, it leans! The picture on the pizza box is true!) or the Eiffel Tower, or the Forbidden City in Beijing, or the Golden Gate Bridge.

That’s how it was for me last weekend, in New York for the TBEX travel blogger’s conference, when I specifically laid out my walking directions in such a way that my path would take me past the Flatiron Building.

Built in 1902 by Daniel Burnham (yes, of Chicago architecture fame) it is one of the most recognizable, most distinctive buildings in the world.

Read this for more Flatiron history, but pause right now and think about a building or structure that you’ve always wanted to see in person and were finally able to stand in front of, ogle it like a doofus, almost get run over as you try to photograph it….not that this happened to me at the Flatiron, mind you….

Please tell us about it, down in the comments.

I want to share my Flatiron squeee! brain ooze feeling with everyone who travels partly for the joy of saying, “I’m really here!”

It has happened; I’ve joined the ranks of smartphone owners with a new Android mobile device.

Now what do I do that is different while I travel?

I pop a lot more photos up on Twitter and Facebook, I scan World Cup and College World Series scores whenever I want to, and I….

Look for power outlets.

While visiting SeaWorld San Antonio this past weekend as a participant in their Texas Blogger day, I had a conversation with one of their public relations folks after I found myself plugging my phone into the wall behind a restaurant trash can.

He said that they’re noticing a lot more visitors bringing smartphones and even netbooks into the park, so they’re thinking about setting up power charging stations to accommodate those blinking battery crises.

Yes, I know how to travel without digital devices. Yes, I can put my SIM card back into my old flip feature phone if I am roughing it somewhere without steady power sources but still want a connection to my family.

The fact is, I’m a pretty wired (actually, wireless) gal and I’ve entered a new phase of learning how to set my phone to Battery Saver and eyeball random walls for power outlets.  When I want to cut myself off from all that, I will, but right now I do not.

What are some of your travel tips for these smartphone power hogs?

Whenever friends visit the Austin area, they ask me for tips on where to go.

Unfortunately, I’m often a rather useless source of information because I live about twenty miles north of Austin, in Round Rock.

I don’t do much bar-hopping or listening to live music downtown (the two favored activities for many Austin visitors) because I have a family and a tourism startup to run….although I’d kill to hear blues guitarist Gary Clark, Jr. at Antone’s sometime.

My bar recommendation is old school – like, 1886 old school – the bar at the Driskill Hotel.

When you walk in, you’ll know that you ain’t in Toledo.  You are most definitely in Texas.

There is no doubt that this is a hotel built by a cattle baron; it hosts inaugural balls for governors and it’s where LBJ met Lady Bird for breakfast on their first date.

The cozy bar is full of Western artworks (including my favorite, a small bronze sculpture of a runaway horse called “The Widow-Maker”) cowhide sofas and things made out of cattle horns, but no snotty attitudes or attempts to be all hipper-than-thou.

There is a low Asshole Factor. People are there to tuck themselves into corners amongst the cowhide, schmooze and relax. People are not there to order ditzy drinks with umbrellas or stupid names. People are not there to be able to say that they hang out in some place that “conjures images of Las Vegas and Palm Springs in the early 60’s” because, hey, they’re visiting Austin, not (blargh) Vegas.

If local flavor, lots of hideaway corners and some over-the-top interior decoration are some of the reasons why you go to a bar, you’d love the Driskill.

What’s a favorite place in your town that you recommend to visitors?

One of my favorite places in Manhattan is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (see more in The American story is alive at this New York Museum.)

I tell visitors to Gotham that they really can skip the Statue of Liberty – other than admiring it from the free Staten Island Ferry – and instead spend time at Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum.  That’s where you can truly feel the impact of the “huddled masses” and what they’ve meant to the city and the nation.

The museum makes a tremendous effort at online outreach; they have a blog, they’re on Facebook and Flickr, and you can follow museum activities on Twitter.

My Mom (as much of an info and history junkie as I am) alerted me to a new book out about cooking and food amongst the wide variety of immigrants living in this special building: Jane Ziegelman’s “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.”

From the book’s description:

“Along the East River, German immigrants founded breweries, dispensing their beloved lager in the dozens of beer gardens that opened along the Bowery. Russian Jews opened tea parlors serving blintzes and strudel next door to Romanian nightclubs that specialized in goose pastrami. On the streets, Italian peddlers hawked the cheese-and-tomato pies known aspizzarelli, while Jews sold knishes and squares of halvah. Gradually, as Americans began to explore the immigrant ghetto, they uncovered the array of comestible enticements of their foreign-born neighbors. 97 Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.”

There’s a post about the book on the museum’s blog, and an interview with the author on NPR’s All Things Considered, “An ‘Edible History’ of Immigrant Families,” that is worth a listen for how it evokes the challenges and unique of cooking in that multistory apartment building.

“[Interviewer] RAZ: One of the jobs that you describe in this area was somebody who was called a cabbage cutter. Describe what that person did.

[Author] Ms. ZIEGELMAN: Sure. He was called, in German, the krauthobler. His job was to go door to door in the tenements with a special cutting device. It resembled a French mandolin, which is a slicing instrument, and for the German homemakers who were making their own sauerkraut, he was sort of the human Cuisinart machine. He would shave their cabbage into the thin shreds that are ideal for sauerkraut-making.

The fact that this individual could exist tells us something about the quantities of sauerkraut that were consumed on the Lower East Side.”

In a world of easy access to every imaginable kind of food in our supermarkets, it’s humbling to see what my US ancestors had to deal with just to make a simple meal.