I’m in the process of writing my trip report. It seems to be taking forever. But it hasn’t really been forever – I’ve been back less than a month. I’m still in Sevilla. I sit and write and check my notes and think about the events and where they fell into place, in my mind vs. in my journal.

You have got to write this stuff down. At least I do. There are blind spots in my brain. Whole days could go by that would be unremembered if I didn’t make a note here or there about what was going on. For example:

On September 30, 1998, in Florence, I wrote in my journal that the Arno was very brown, that I could have had a bartender named Lorenzo but chose not to, and that I was smoking cigarettes and it felt really good.

What I remember: my friend Lisa was hanging with some guy named Carmello. He took us to a bar, full of guys, who looked at us with suspicion. Lorenzo, the bartender, was aloof, until he asked me what I thought of Carmello, and I said, “stronzo.”

I didn’t know much Italian, but I knew that word. I didn’t really think Carmello was a stronzo. I think I was just trying to impress Lorenzo with my usage of Italian swear words. “Why don’t you stay?” he asked, when we were leaving.

I’m not sure I would even have this memory at all, had I not written a short paragraph about it in one of my scraggly notebooks. It’s not even that great of a memory. But it is A MEMORY.

If I didn’t have these journals, I could never write a trip report. I’m about to post a trip report from a journey I took four years ago, and I can because I wrote down everything on that trip.

Sometimes the writing is really lame:

“Everyone has an umbrella here. It rains alot.” (Man, that is FANTASTIC. George W. could do better.)

Sometimes it is better:

“The boy from the glass shop comes into the cafe and he and the barman have a quick drink and hum to each other.” (Did this really happen, or is this my perception of what happened? Hmmm.)

Sometimes it takes a while before you can read your journal and think, hey, that is pretty good.

It’s important to me that it be good – but it is more important to me that I’ve recorded it.

All that I’m asking tonight, is that I make it back home alive. No explosions, no crashes, no fights. I want to get back home tonight.

Jason from Grandaddy

I remember, in the early days of my travelin’ years, I was oh so happy with Destinations like Las Vegas. I was in my early 20’s, and really, Vegas was a pretty cool destination in those days. In 1991 Vegas, the Sands was still there, they still had $4.99 prime rib and you could still envision Doris Day being thrown into the pool. The MGM Grand was the hip and happening new spot then, and now the MGM seems as has-been as the Riviera did then. Vegas was a different place in 1991, full of bad wigs and nickle slots, and I loved it.

Here we are fifteen years later, and my scope has broadened just a bit. First, lots of trips to Vermont and Chicago, both places I love enough to live in, and then finally, in 1998, my first trip to Italy.

Damn. (Swear word. Swear word.) I touched down on that tarmac in Rome and I was a goner. I mean, really gone, like a (swear word) slave. If I had thought weekend trips to Vegas were addicting, I was not prepared for what Italy would do to me.

For a few years, I was a slave to Italy. Then the pull was too great, and I pushed myself by sheer will into an apartment in Venice. There, I tired of my master and moved on to other lovers, by way of the St. Lucia Train Station. How I loved them all.

Amsterdam, Copenhagen. Budapest, where I spent a sick and twisted yet colorful summer month. Strasborg, Vienna… the blood of the nomad was in me, and Europe was the flying carpet on which I rode.

Now. I am in a place I love, an ocean community full of freaks. It is truly beautiful here, and very, very free. But I can’t calm myself, the thought of unseen cities makes me scratch the mosquito bite on my chest a bit too hard. I am a nomad of the 21st century – I can have it all, so why isn’t it here, now?

So I have been playing the lottery, and waiting, waiting. Thinking of writing to the Icelandic Tourist Board to see if they perhaps need someone to write a restaurant book. I don’t know. It’s the bleeping trouble with travel.

At a cafe in Sevilla during Semana Santa, we sat down at a table and were given a menu that almost gave me a rupture then and still gives me fits of giggles now. The menu, clearly created and photocopied for the fiesta, came home with me in my journal.

Each menu item is offered in a full size portion (racion) and a half portion (media racion.)

Media racion in a straight translation = half racion. Media racion in screwed-up English translation: Stocking racion.

Hmmm. How does “half” become “stocking?”

But it gets better. Check out of some of these menu items.

Lom Lunny Dry
Cane Loin
Loin Flesh Oven
Tuna Pickles

Let’s try to break this down.

Lom Lunny Dry. The Spanish dish is called “Mojama.” This is a blue fin tuna prepared in some manner. Lom Lunny Dry? What Spanish-English dictionary is this? At least it was only 6 Euro for a Stocking racion!

Cane Loin. Probably Spaniards crack up when we say stuff like “Tender Loin.” They probably threw this one on the menu with a snicker. As far as I can tell, “Cana de lomo” is either a meat cone, a meat bone, or meat in a draft beer from Paraguay.

Loin Flesh Oven. Ahhh, my favorite. It sounds like the title of a porno movie! I about peed my pants when I read this one. This came from “Lomo Mechado” which according to my Eating and Drinking in Spain book, this can “mean any number of things, but most often refers to a roast.” Please, elaborate, what else can it mean? There has got to be something sick and twisted somewhere in the usage of this term.

Tuna Pickles. This is pretty tame compared to the others, but I bet one could get children to eat their fish by calling it a “pickle.” I, for one, am going to attempt this dish very soon, because anything that is pickled or is served with pickles rocks.

So on this day, we ordered a simple plate of “Prawa,” a Fino for me and a beer for mom. I wasn’t yet into my Fino phase, but that’s what I got and so that is what I drank. We peeled the little shrimps and watched all the locals celebrating the first day of the fiesta. Someday I will go back and order a Stocking Racion of Loin Flesh Oven. It will probably be on my mind until I do.

I can’t believe it is May already. It is hot in San Diego, summer is here, there are girls in bikinis and drunk guys with tattoos all over the place. There are keggers and guys with signs that say “I have weed for sale.” I am not sure that my little hamlet is part of the real world. But it is good to come home from a long and tiring work trip and get back into non-reality.

So. The company I work for gives out an award every year, for excellence in wine literature. That is, the writing of many books about wine. In order to get the award you have to have written about American wine a bit. All the most famous wine writers have received this award, except for Oz Clarke. I’m sure he doesn’t really give a fig about this, but I am just as sure he would be pretty happy to come and accept it if he did. This year, the recipient was the 90 something year old Robert Lawrence Balzer. At first I was like, why are we giving the award to that guy? I didn’t realize, that he is totally loved by all these old winemaker and wine industry guys. Plus, he hung out with Gloria Swanson (which he went on and on about in his speech.) OK. Homie REALLY won my respect when I spotted him, during the Press (I mean part Press and part Professional Drunk/Gate Crasher) tasting, smoking a cigarette on the steps of the California Culinary Academy with a couple of young, hot, future grill cooks. I tried to be accomodating (which of these 790 wines would you like on your dinner table, Mr. Balzer? He gives me the look that is given to all women who are not Gloria Swanson.)

It was a good event – out of 14 of them (in almost 20 years) I have done 13 and it’s getting pretty smooth now. I can’t even begin to describe the set up of 800 or more different wines, on long tables, by varietal, at 6 A.M. Well I could describe but it would be really boring. Just imagine setting 150 Chardonnays on long tables in alphabetical order and then discovering you forgot one. You then have to move 300 bottles four inches to make room. Let me just say that there is a bit of Champagne flowing amongst the staff by 10 AM, when the Press/Professional Drunk Gate Crasher Tasting starts.

The Press/PDGC tasting goes for six hours, and then we clean everything up for a big banquet and all the boys at my work (all hot 30 somethings) are in tuxes and I am in a cocktail dress from Ross Dress for Less. I sometimes have a hard time getting rid of the PDGCs at 4:00. At 3:30 I go around and say WE ARE DONE IN HALF AN HOUR. PLEASE MOVE ALONG. Some of these dudes are still on Gewurztraminers; there are about 500 reds to get through, and they want to try them all (or at least all the expensive ones.) Last year, there was a bit of a problem as some of these guys did not listen to me but instead, at 4:00, proceeded to pour 3/4 full glasses of Stags Leap Cabernet straight down their throats. So this year, I wasn’t taking any of that nonsense and instead told them, borrowing from the film Pulp Fiction, that if they did not finish by 4:00 I was “going to get medieval on their ass.” Well, what do you know! It worked! They all left by 4:15. I need to expand this whole S & M thing with the wine writers in my life.

So we (us and 150 other paying folks, like Mr. Robert Mondavi) eat and drink and then we have several hundred bottles of wine, half or 3/4 full, left over. Everyone asks, what do you do with all that leftover wine?

Well, email me and I will tell you.