If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I was in Santa Fe last week. I was there for a work conference and I annoyingly Foursquared and tweeted my way through everything.

I get romantic and wistful when I fly on airplanes. I get daydreamy and introspective as I fly above the earth and look down at the vast landscape beneath me. I love sitting at the window and staring down at everything. On this trip I flew through Dallas, so part of my trip was Dallas< -->Santa Fe. The plane flew over numerous crop irrigation circles and isolated north Texas towns, and I imagined all the people living in those little places. People I will never meet, towns I will never visit. It makes me sad that I’ll never meet them. I spot what is probably a high school football field, and I imagine everyone from the town and the nearby farms getting together there on Friday nights for high school football games. They live in these self-contained places where everyone knows who everyone else is. I wouldn’t really want to live there. But it still makes me wistful.

I see a small town, and then a long, straight road that must go on for a couple of miles, and then at the end of the road I see another small town. I’ll never know what towns they were.

But no. The thing is, with the internet, I really can see those places again. I can see the flight path I took, and I can click on the Google Earth link and see my flight path in Google Earth and zoom in on the towns I probably flew over. Maybe I was looking at Tulia, Texas, and Happy, Texas?

It’s so cool that with the internet, we can capture these moments and memories and places that used to just flow through our fingers like sand before disappearing forever. Now we can revisit them. I love it.