Item Number 20: Go foraging for wild mushrooms

I have incredibly, incredibly talented and useful friends.

After I made my 30 before 30 list, one of the first calls I made was to my friend, Ian, who owns Far West Fungi, one of my favorite stores in the San Francisco Ferry Building. I explained to him that I’d made this list, and that going on a mushroom foray was one of my goals for the year. I asked him to keep me in the loop, whenever he and his peeps decided to go out on a hike and mushroom foray.

Ian is the kind of friend who comes through in the clutch, so I expected that I’d hear from him eventually. What I didn’t expect, though, was to be invited on the greatest retreat of all time: a foray and food weekend in Big Sur.

Ian’s lovely fiancee, Kiera, is an event planner, and she knocked our socks off! We stayed in a few rustic cabins or at the Big Sur River Inn, right down the road. Kiera convinced her friend, Greg Dunmore, to come along for the fun. Greg just happens to be an incredible chef, and he whipped up a fabulous dinner for us after our four-mile mushroom tromp. The weekend also involved a few rousing board games (Apples to Apples is about to join my household, as it is the Funnest Game Ever), several drives up and down the coast, and evenings reminiscent of post-lights-out hilarity at summer camp. We also got to tour the Far West farm and learn all about the cultivation of exotic mushrooms.

In short, it was amazing.

(And then I got a cold and had to come home a day early, because I couldn’t breathe. But that’s a completely unrelated item. Incidentally, though, I think that Wellness has now joined Joy as a word of the year)

Thanks so much, Ian and Kiera! It was a great weekend, and a superb way to check of Item Number 20!