You may have noticed a bit of a repose on my recent splurge of posts, this is because I was up in the wilds of Canada hiking in thick, beautiful forests with my gal pals, plenty of mountain streams and these lovely fungi’s. 

Can you believe this beguiling blue specimen? I’ve tried to identify it on line but couldn’t find any images of this exact shape. But, from my cursory research I’ve learned that blue mushrooms are quite rare, so I feel very fortunate to have observed a few in person, especially as these positioned themselves so beautifully in a bed of thick green moss accented with some smaller orange pals. 

 We ventured north to spend a week at Mountain Trek, a fitness retreat and health spa… I wasn’t sure what to expect entirely, but I must say that the week gave me a great deal to think about and relieved me of a nice little chunk of pounds and a few inches. 

As I did when I visited The Ranch in Malibu, I plan to come back to you with my top take aways for  fitness and well being from the program, after I have a chance to implement some of their teachings and principle into my real life.

They shared a great deal of information about metabolism, nutrition, fitness, detoxification, sleep and stress management and how all of these elements affect your level of….

“Vitality”, 

which, by definition is: 

“the state of being strong and active; energy and also: the power giving continuance of life, present in all living things”.

Vitality was the operative word in all that we learned and all that we did at MT, the theory being that yes, we all want to live a long life, but not a life where we spend most of our time in bed counting our cats and wondering when our diapers will next be changed. We want to be active and healthy, and as we age, we need to work hard to develop habits to keep our bodies fully functioning to achieve that elite status. 

Now, I’m not a mycologist, but I know that this is a big, luscious Lobster Mushroom (hypomyces lactifluorum), you can find them more and more frequently in the markets this time of the year. 

Not only do they look like a lobster {the crustacean~like color actually comes from an attacking mold}, but the texture and taste, when cooked, is similar to lobster meat. But we were on a set diet at Mountain Trek, so we left this gargantuan specimen for fortunate future foragers. 

Post-Trek I hopped on a plane to join Mr. Splendid at the Pied~de~Eze where I am staring out on the Med on this sunny day as I write. We’ve been enjoying these early fall days here, saying good bye to some of our favorite beach front restaurants, and hiking and riding up in the Alps, I’ll be sharing some new finds and old favorites soon. 

But now, I’ve got to get my vitality going with a march up our beloved Chemin de Nietzsche.

I’ll leave you today with this quote from Jerome Bock, an early German botanist. He said: 

“Fungi and truffles are neither herbs, nor roots, nor flowers, nor seeds, but merely the superfluous moisture or earth, of trees, or rotten wood, and of other rotting things. This is plain from the fact that all fungi and truffles, especially those that are used for eating, grow most commonly in thundery and wet weather”.