2024 National Tour Announced!

Our fifth cross-country national mushroom tour will take place in April of 2024. Here are some highlights:

A New Basecamp

Meet Aragorn and Radagast! Radagast (fully deployed without solar in the above photo) is of course our off-grid, solar portable cabin acquired last May, and he’s already gotten a bit of a workout and proven his mettle hunting for both Spring 2023 and Fall 2023 mushrooms.

But in December we paired Radagast with a new tow vehicle, a 2023 Toyota Tacoma TRD Off-Road (double cab, long bed). The Tacoma tows Radagast like a dream, handles itself extremely well on forest roads, and gets decent gas mileage (18/24mpg city/highway) to boot. We’re excited to see how the duo will perform on our next tour from the Northwest to the Northeast.

“Why ‘Aragorn’?” you may ask. You’ve probably noticed a tendency to name our vehicles, recently in fitting with Lord of the Rings characters. My wife is getting a new electric vehicle this Spring, and we’ve always tried to reflect an historical romance with our vehicle names. So my Tacoma will be “Aragorn (the Lord of the Rings’ famous Strider) and hers will be Arwen (Strider’s elfish love interest).

Our last vehicles borrowed from biblical names (Aquilla and Priscilla).

A Themed Tour Venturing Into Darkness

A highlight (so to speak) of our fifth cross-country tour will be the total eclipse which we will observe from a location in the forests of upstate New York on the afternoon of Monday, April 8. (It was my privilege to observe the last total eclipse as it passed over Oregon a few years back, and it was a fantastic experience.)

While in the northeast, and across the country, we will of course also once again investigate mushrooms — principally the famed Morel. Last year (in May) we had the general sense we were a bit too late. So hopefully we will have better fortunes in April. (We will keep you posted here!)

My son-in-law Mike frequently makes these journeys (or at least part of them) with me, as well as our research associate, Dr. Dave Lingenfelter. Mike is very good at coming up with themes, and so this year (as we will probably take a more southerly route than previously) we may do some Route 66 travel.

But we could also of course title our tour “Into Darkness,” thanks to the April 8 event! (Can you tell we’re excited?)

Previous tours have featured Oregon’s Humongous Fungus, a Trans-Canada Journey, and Route 30 (Lincoln Highway).

Stay tuned for updates! If you live in the northeast (particular Pennsylvania and New York, but also Tennessee and states to the west), we’d love to connect with you during our tour, so please reach out!

About Our New Site

We first launched MushroomObsession.com on the Fourth of July, 2016, utilizing the “Shopify” platform. During the past 8 years we have posted dozens of articles and blog posts there.

But last year we decided to switch models from a for-profit business to a hobby organization. Mainly this was because helping people learn how to safely hunt exotic edible mushrooms (and hunting them ourselves) was more important to us than making money doing so! (And the insurance and other costs associated with running this type of business are ridiculous.)

One of those high costs was the “Shopify” online sales platform. Since we no longer needed or used its capabilities, we decided to transition to a much less expensive WordPress blogging-oriented platform. What you are looking at today is our rebuilt website on this new platform.

Over the years we received dozens of encouraging comments and likes on the various blog posts we made. We aren’t able to duplicate them all here, but we have copied some of them over. So, on all posts older than this one which contain comments, you will see that we have listed the commenter’s name and date at the top of the comment. Since we aren’t able to actually replicate their account with WordPress, the icon will be different.

In the future (with this blog post and beyond) you will see the original comment as submitted. And we encourage all (and respond to most) comments. Thank you!