If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

ello everyone! Sorry it has been, as per usual, approximately one million years since my last post here. We've been pleasantly caught up in a whirl of tiny visits with faraway friends on the way to and from far-flung family fêtes, hibernating with mugs of cocoa and whipped cream, and most exciting of all, running away to the woods for a self guided fairy tale mushroom tour!

We decided to skip town late Thanksgiving eve for lack of anything better to do, eventually winding up in a perfectly beautifully ghostly deserted Astoria, dining on a Thanksgiving feast of convenience store wine, cheese and chocolate (Not having considered that everything would be closed!), thankfully finding room for the night at the cute new Commodore Hotel, and set out first thing in the a.m. for the magically silent woods, where I'm still beyond excited to have seen my very first amanitas in the wild!
We spotted these:

and so many more! I posted a few more cute mushroom clusters on my flickr and hope to capture oh so many more when we go back soon for a real Park Ranger guided tour, where we will also hopefully learn how to spot things that we can actually eat!

Ps. Magical letter H courtesy of Jessica Hische at Daily Drop Cap, my new favorite thing in the world!