Last weekend we took a trip to New Hampshire to visit the vacationing Golds. Sam and Ellen have a place on Lake Winnipesaukee and were there with their family. Rob and Kay were also there with Sarah. With our small crew it almost turned into another family reunion. We were pretty beat from the Nebraska trip so we only made a day out of it. But it was good fun to see all of the family and catch up. Sarah is off to Edinburgh for school in the fall, so the visit was also a goodbye to her. Bye Sarah! We hope you're having a blast in Scotland.
Sam and Ellen had a bunch of lake-gear. Alden particularly loved this inflatable with a membrane bottom. No sand to touch, no cold water to ruin things, just a fun ride in a warm doughnut thanks to the thermal properties of PVC.
This weekend we took a family hike up
Mt. Pisgah where, you may recall, last year at about this time we took Joshua, Cheyenne and Ronin and came home with several bags full of blueberries. A few years before that Joshua, Cheyenne and Kerstin stumbled on a large patch of chanterelles at Mt. Pisgah, so we were hoping that we would be able to come home with something tasty. Alas, it seems that without Joshua and Cheyenne, the forest is reluctant to give up its bounty. The blueberry and huckleberry pickings up the main trail were slim. We managed a scant half a cup of berries after nearly an hour of effort. Either our fellow hikers had denuded the bushes or the weather contributed to severely decreased yield. We had no luck with mushrooms either. The forest was shockingly bereft of all kinds of fungi! This was especially surprising since we've had nearly 3 weeks of straight rain, with the sun returning for only the past 3 or 4 days. We glimpsed a few Indian Pipes (actually not a fungus), but no amanitas, boletes, lepiotas, or psilocybes (we even found the crooked tree where we'd found psilocybes on a rotting log last year. Rotting log was still there, but no mushrooms). We were pretty sad. Alden picked out his hiking outfit below by himself (no really!) and kept us pretty entertained, but in the end, mosquitoes and biting flies forced us to put a shirt on Alden and put him in more comfortable shoes.
Alden at the Mt. Pisgah tower.
Sam and Ellen had a bunch of lake-gear. Alden particularly loved this inflatable with a membrane bottom. No sand to touch, no cold water to ruin things, just a fun ride in a warm doughnut thanks to the thermal properties of PVC.
This weekend we took a family hike up Mt. Pisgah where, you may recall, last year at about this time we took Joshua, Cheyenne and Ronin and came home with several bags full of blueberries. A few years before that Joshua, Cheyenne and Kerstin stumbled on a large patch of chanterelles at Mt. Pisgah, so we were hoping that we would be able to come home with something tasty. Alas, it seems that without Joshua and Cheyenne, the forest is reluctant to give up its bounty. The blueberry and huckleberry pickings up the main trail were slim. We managed a scant half a cup of berries after nearly an hour of effort. Either our fellow hikers had denuded the bushes or the weather contributed to severely decreased yield. We had no luck with mushrooms either. The forest was shockingly bereft of all kinds of fungi! This was especially surprising since we've had nearly 3 weeks of straight rain, with the sun returning for only the past 3 or 4 days. We glimpsed a few Indian Pipes (actually not a fungus), but no amanitas, boletes, lepiotas, or psilocybes (we even found the crooked tree where we'd found psilocybes on a rotting log last year. Rotting log was still there, but no mushrooms). We were pretty sad. Alden picked out his hiking outfit below by himself (no really!) and kept us pretty entertained, but in the end, mosquitoes and biting flies forced us to put a shirt on Alden and put him in more comfortable shoes.
Alden at the Mt. Pisgah tower.
1 comment:
psilocybes? really? The section in my mushroom book on psilocybes isn decent but reading through it it seemed like they were easily mis-identified. I guess the easiest way to be sure would be to pop one in you mouth. Was it Kurt or Joshua?
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