It’s no secret Mendocino is special to me.  Eric and I took our first real camping trip to MacKericher State Park, my favorite place to camp in all of California.  And he and I got married in Mendocino.  Mendocino is also home to the best baguette in California at Cafe Beaujolais! 🙂 We go back any chance we get probably camping there at least twice per year.  This year we decided to celebrate our anniversary attending a festival I have always wanted to visit…the Mushroom Festival.

We arrived on a friday and set up camp.  If you have never been to MacKericher you have been missing out.  I will surely blog all about it another day.  But, one of the awesome things about this coastal campground is its forest.  And in November this forest comes alive with mushrooms.  The mushrooms make the coast and the forests mystical and interesting.  And while I might lament the lack of fall colors for only a second they are totally crowded out by fall mushrooms.  We even had multiple mushrooms right in our campsite.

Before going anywhere for the festival we embarked, with Amelia in tow, through a large grove of forest that is parallel to the ocean.  The mushrooms were overwhelming and plentiful.  And since it is a state park no one was able to pick them.  There were tiny delicate mushrooms, large red dangerous mushrooms, mushrooms with personality, mushrooms that looked like they could kill you, blankets of mushrooms, mushrooms that could win the prize for largest mushrooms, mushrooms that could take the prize for smallest mushroom, mushrooms that looked like candy, and mushrooms that looked like they were freaks of nature.  Anything you want, this forest did not disappoint.  At this point, we were totally uneducated on what any of the mushrooms were called and if any of them were safe to eat.  

Stand by for part two of the Mushroom festival to come soon…