Race to Mushroom Mountain

A Mushroom walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a drink. The bartender says "No way! We don`t serve your kind here!" The mushroom says "Ahh come on, I`m a Fungi!"


The 26th Annual Wild Mushroom Fair

A couple of weeks back on one of the several home school yahoo groups I'm on there was a link to a Mushroom festival weekend hapening over at the Los Angeles Arboretum.

This was the flier that captured my attention and wooed me.

Now I have been interested in mushrooms for a while now. Skye and I had grown mushrooms a year or so ago as part of a "science" class and I had been planning to order some spores and do a similar project as one of the topics in my Ecology 101 class. I was also very interested in foraging for wild mushrooms and had been planning on trying to go on an outing with the mushroom club.

I thought the timing of this post I came upon was perfect. So I collected Skye from a sleepover she had been too and raced to catch the last bit of Mushroom Extravaganza. There were plenty of other things I could have been doing, that I should have been doing, but not to deny my distractable nature would be, well unnatural.

So from Marina Del Rey we raced to literally the other side of town, in fact beyond the other side of town to the Los Angeles Arboretum. And then the frustrating obstacles really started, there was no parking, road rage was raging among throngs of people who came out on this beautiful day to relax in the gardens. Finally due in large part to the Prius' compactness we managed to squeeze in a small spot, so that we could go wait in line for half an hour. Their system of one cashier taking only cash and checks, with a broken ATM in the lobby was not really working and the ragers that had successfully napped a piece of asphalt for their cars now had to wait and wait in the sun, no shade for the line which was ironic because being a botanical garden there were hundreds of trees and arbors and such, just not at the line to get into the joint.

We raced through the gardens to get to the Mushroom-fest before it closed, by this point starving and a bit grumpy.

This is the poster that greeted us upon entry and I do quite like it.

The "festival" itself left a little to be desired, pretty much on the same level as a high school science fair. There were some interesting information and some perfectly lovely displays, it just didn't meet up to the hype. The long drive, bad parking and ridiculous line certainly didn't help. Add to that we were on the tail end of the weekend and I think all the "good" demos and events had already happened.



The exhibit was set up on folding tables in a dreary hall.



Like I said, valid worthwhile information, a bit lacking in the presentation.



Unfortunate because there were some pretty amazing fungi collections











Look at the size of that one mushrooms.





There were lots of types of mushrooms to be sure.

But with all this fungi, everywhere there was none to eat. So Skye and I ended up in another line, paying for overpriced yucky park food. Skye got the hot dog, always a "safe" bet, I on the other hand ordered a Thai noodle salad trying to be healthy. I ended up more with a soup of dressing and some drippy, droopy noodles.

We went back to the exhibit to make sure that we hadn't missed anything.

Nope, but at least now we could wander and investigate without pangs of hunger distracting us form our mycological wandering.



This is the group that I want to get involved with, you know in my free time the "Los Angeles Mycological Society". I would like to forage the local terrains hunting for mushroom with some experts before relying on a guidebook and my own peepers.