I drive a lot. Sometimes for hours, days, sometimes for weeks. Sometimes I spend more time in my car than I do in my apartment.

Thankfully, I have a lot of CDs and a 6 CD changer. Before you freak out, let me assure you – there are benefits to the old way, of That Time Before the IPod. You know what? IPods are lame when it comes to Driving Music. Long hours of driving require one thing: listening to the same six records over and over. Maybe even the same record, over and over. Maybe, even, the same SONG over and over.

There are certain things that sound better in the car. Somehow the sound of cracking a beer open sounds better in a car, to me, even though I don’t drink beer. Maybe it’s a recollected memory thing. Like that memory of being in a car, like a 1970 Nova or what have you, but in like 1982, and the sun is going down and leaving crystals on the windshield (or maybe, it is foggy) and there is that sound of metal hitting metal and that tiny hiss of the can opening. It’s a kind of music. Driving music.

But getting back to music. For some reason, I love Sonic Youth in my car better than at home. I could listen to Rather Ripped over and over in my car, but at home it bores me. Sonic Youth is so awesome in the car. The perfect Driving Music.

I’ve been wanting to elaborate on the whole driving music thing for some time. And I will, eventually, with greater detail. In the meantime, I could not stop listening, driving from San Diego to Anaheim to Palm Springs and back, to PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. For hours and hours I totally got into myself, and her, and the year 2000, all over again. I was in love, she was in love. My thing turned ugly, hers ended. But listening to her account of it brings it all back – what it was like to be in love – for a moment, or an hour. Or six hours, or a couple of days. However long the CD is in my changer.

Yeah. Still I came home and had to watch the video. Yo, people who ask why I’m not “with someone?” Because… if it is not like this, it is not worth it.

If it’s not like this, it’s not worth it.

He’s his uncle Tom’s nephew. A future rock star.

He’s also takes after me in some ways.

Damn. Is he awesome or what?

Well, I just wrote this whole long thing on the totally bizarre website of Marisa Churchill but then I deleted it. Google it. Go ahead, you know you want to. Her website I mean. It’s pretty wacky. I’m almost, like, at a loss for words.

I have one thing to say to the bloggers over at Amuse-Biatch (one of my new favorite blogs, by the way.) Did you not see that full-on eye-suckulation that Chef Ming peformed on Padma’s ass when she got up from the judges table? That was some serious eye-gropage. Wish I had a picture of that.

Anyhow. Tomorrow I am going to Disneyland and Saturday I am going to party in Palm Springs so hopefully I will forget about all this sordidness for a little while. Whenever I start to get that crazy image in my head I’m going to think, “and now, MINNIE MOUSE” in my best Strip Club voice.

So I almost couldn’t bring myself to post this because it is just too weird.

Last night, or this morning… sometime in that other reality, anyway, I had this insanely crazy thing happen in one of my dreams. It wasn’t weird like flying over pits of a purple substance that looked like melted PopRocks or weird like making out with Vanessa Redgrave or other types of bizarre randomness. It was even weirder – I was holding a bean and cheese burrito, and it farted. TWICE.

At the risk of becoming known as the blogger who once confessed she dreamed about a farting burrito, I am not sure I can let this one pass without asking for some outsider tips about what the fuck this all means. Not only did the burrito fart twice, but before it farted, it sort of stiffened up in a pre-fart pose. It was an Animistic Burrito. A farting burrito with a SOUL. How else can I explain it? There is no possible way. I don’t think.

Right before I went to bed I was reading this book I got at a garage sale yesterday for fifty cents, called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Reincarnation. My favorite line so far? “And now this Complete Idiot’s Guide gives reincarnation another boost of respectability.” Um, OK.

So was my dream somehow connected to reincarnation? Or maybe the burrito symbolizes a penis? A farting penis? Or maybe, this is just a subtle move on my brain’s part to tell me to lay off the bean burritos. I don’t know.

In other news, I made the most kick-ass homemade ravioli this weekend, with pumpkin, crushed amaretti and Riesling. And I also made two ice creams – a chocolate one laced with grappa and a creamy custardy one with an acorn liqueur I bought in Spain. I think I might have a future in ice cream – Shannon’s Super Sexy Ice Creams. No kids can have it though.

This is why.

Also, Pimientos de Padron. And, Albarino. More later, have a great weekend.

I woke up at 3:30 A.M. and couldn’t get back to sleep. Jet lag sucks. Finally I decided to get up and look at my pictures. Then I started to get hungry, so I decided to post all my food pictures. So. Here are just a few of the items I ate in Spain.

The famous Pimientos de Padron, my new favorite food. Only we can’t get them here. The peppers look like jalapenos, but they are not hot, except once in a while you get a hot one, so it’s like playing Russian Roulette in your mouth. They fry these quickly in olive oil and then sprinkle them rather liberally with coarse salt. These peppers are on almost every menu in the northwest, but we sadly couldn’t find them anywhere else. Actually we did see them on a menu board in Sevilla on our last day, but the menu board did not seem to belong to anyone. It was just sitting in the street, driving us crazy.

If Brian had these at The OB Vine I would eat them every single day. I am serious. WAIT! They ARE grown here in California. BRIAN! If you start making these I will come in every day instead of only five days a week. Check it out. Shannon’s Favorite Vegetable in the World.

Our favorite tapas bar of the whole trip – O Bispo in Santiago de Compostela. We ate there something like twenty times in four days.

This is not a food picture, but a picture of a bar called O Cortello in Pontevedra. It was one of the craziest, weirdest bars I have ever been in, and we had incredible fried calamari there two nights in a row. This place is not for the squeamish. It is dirty, there is a dog in the kitchen, and there are some pretty strange goings-on. I loved it in there.

We always ordered coffee in our room when that service was possible, but one time Mom accidentally ordered a complete breakfast (to the tune of about thirty-five bucks.) This is what we got. Check out the pile of bread-type items. Thankfully we had plenty of zip-lock baggies and we were eating muffins from this breakfast for weeks. Also, I caught a slight cold around that time, so we figure St. James was responsible for the slip-up, so that I would drink some orange juice. St. James was always looking after us after I hugged his statue, I think.

Mmm… a bottle of Ribeira del Duero, looking at a castle keep, in our room in Vilalba. Later I ate the freshest piece of fish I have ever had in my life, but I forgot to take a picture of it.

A fat plate of Cabrales cheese (zip-lock bag came in handy here as well) and chorizo cooked in hard cider, at the Parador in Cangas de Onis near the Picos de Europas mountains.

Probably our favorite meal of the trip and we had the same thing two nights in a row – room service in our fantastic room in Cervera de Pisuerga. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers baked in a clay pot, a steak sandwich, wine, and German MTV. I was in heaven.

The breakfast room at the Parador in Cervera. Please take note of the bottle of Syrah for the people who like a little strong red wine with their cereal.

On night, on a whim, I decided to order a room service meal of many bottles of wine and some different baby foods. Just kidding. This was a display of possibilities though, of which Spain has many.

Spanish stews kick ass. This one is potatoes and chorizo, and I ate it in the Rioja with a fine bottle, of, uh, Rioja.

Just so you don’t get the idea that eating is Spain is perfect, voila, a misfire in Bilbao. The wine was off and the chorizo squirted me when we finally had the balls to ask the bartender for a fork. The two old dudes drinking big-gulp sized brandies and singing tunes from the pre-Franco days were kind of humorous though. Someday I want to go back to Bilbao and go to all the bars there, which could take a couple of years, even if you visited a few a day.

Then we got to the south, where Clive and Sue fed us lots of healty food which at that point we surely needed. Clive, now known as Man of La Plancha, cooked up all these vegetables for us the first night on his grill. They grow all their own vegetables, watched over, at the moment, by Guard Bunny.

Another delicious dinner from the creative minds of Clive and Sue. Pork kebabs, rice, mushrooms and lots of wine sure tasted good after a day of spelunking and uber hiking.

Red peppers stuffed with a seafood mixture and topped with two cream sauces (carrot and asparagus? I think.) A lovely presentation and a tasty dish, in a quiet restaurant in El Bosque. There was a little boy in there that was kind of tripping on my hair though. He came around and stood by the wall near me for a while, to try to figure out how purple was possible.

After I had to say goodbye to the Czech architects from the Sherry tasting, I decided to go for some Spanish boys instead. Just kidding, this is just a picture of a picture, silly.

This is Guard Bunny, the rabbit that watches over the road to Clive and Sue´s place.

I kid you not.

We are packed and ready to head to Sevilla tomorrow, to get our flight home. I have that icky feeling in my stomach, the one you get when the journey is almost over. We have had such an awesome trip and the last week with Clive and Sue was like hanging out with old friends (that know all the best places.) Tonight we are going out for a last meal with them. Last, I guess, until the next time. This has been a real adventure and I feel I have seen parts of Spain that tourists rarely see. I have been in the middle of a movie, in the middle of a painting, and in the middle of a song. All on this trip.

It will be strange to be home, but it is always good being back home in OB. I´ve got Albarino and Jamon Jamon Ruffles that will bring me back, at least for a minute.

Onward.

You are probably all wondering what happened to me. Basically, I am being held captive in a cool house surrounded by mountains and gardens and stuff. I can´t make any attempts to escape because there is a guard rabbit watching the road and also, there are scary drain pipes that you can fall into if you aren´t careful. I know this, because I have seen the rabbit and because Clive and Sue´s landlord fell in a drainpipe. So I guess I am trapped here and am being force fed all kinds of fresh garden vegetables that Clive cooks on a big metal thing on an open fire, and then we have to have stuff like lemon merengue pie and chocolate mousse that Sue made for us. Then I have to get in a jeep thing and be driven around to Roman ruins and white towns on the sides of mountains and places where they force feed me wine and fried fish. It´s been rough, let me tell you.

I feel like I have been traveling a really long time. You get to a place where you seem to have forgotten what it is like to be home. Where is home, anyway? Maybe I can just hang out here for a while longer and remain a captive. Yesterday I went to a Sherry tasting thing and there were some cute Czech architect students types at our table, and I was REALLY thinking it might be nice to hang here for a while. Only they are probably going somewhere else soon, like Cadiz or something, but when you think about it, there is probably a constant stream of young backpacker types at Sherry tastings. Right? It´s like, almost a perfect world.

Today I went down in a cave and saw some prehistoric paintings that were 35,000 years old but I have to say, caves are not my cup of tea. Caves are scary and slimy and dark, but the paintings were pretty amazing. If I weren´t so scared of caves, it would be kind of cool to find one and paint something in it, then in 35,000 someone might find it and be like, who IS that blond guy and are those beans and noodles or what?

There is so, so much more but my mind is sort of on overload, what with Czech youngsters and Fino sherry and Roman bricks and all that. Tonight we have to eat some gazpacho and some pork thingys cooked on a big metal thing, and I will try to write more tomorrow.