Your wanderings are the travelling you have done with no fixed plan — going from place to place, staying only a short time in each. The word is almost always plural, and it almost always looks backwards: people talk about their wanderings after they are over, when the whole messy journey has become a story. 'During my wanderings in South America…' is the natural shape.

It is not the word for an organised trip. A two-week package tour is not wanderings. The word needs the idea that you did not really know where you would end up, and that there were many places rather than one.

It often sounds a little old-fashioned or literary, and slightly warm — the speaker is fond of that time in their life. Sometimes it carries a small joke about being aimless: 'after my wanderings around Europe' can mean 'the years I spent with no job and no idea what I was doing'.

There is a second use for the mind. Wanderings can be thoughts that drift with no direction, especially when someone is very tired or very ill and their talk stops making sense: 'the wanderings of a sick old man'. This use is less common but you will meet it in books.