Mushrooms... and the Sportster

My friend Spencer and I went mushroom hunting yesterday at the Wickiup Hill Nature Center. I met him there as I really wanted to ride my Sportster there, which now has the detachable backrest and Rush pipes attached to it. The pipe have truly made the difference in the bike and have seemingly changed it from some random cruiser motorcycle and has made it into the Harley Davidson with the very distinctive loud, rumble of its twelve- hundred cc motor. Almost needless to say… I absolutely love my bike.

As a side note, to completely get away from my topic for a brief moment I went up to Minneapolis, Minnesota this weekend to visit my dad’s best friend there. His best friend happens to be a director and has made commercials for Plato’s closet and some air lines as well. He had an old Harley- Davidson jacket and he gave it to me, and the leather jacket is legit. It looks like the kind the outlaw motorcyclists used to wear in the 50s to 70s. If any of you ever see a guy on a Harley Sportster riding around Cedar Rapids in a black, leather jacket it might very well be me.

But back to the main point of this blog. We got out there and soon took the necessary one and a half mile hike to where the elm tress. (To those who don’t know anything about mushroom hunting, they grow under recently deceased elm trees and they need plenty of water, warm temperatures, and sun.) As we got out to the first spot we quickly spotted three yellow mushrooms, and that was it at this spot that I had thought would hold a large number of morel mushrooms. We at least found some and by that point I had thought maybe we were a bit early to be hunting for the large quantity of mushrooms that I like all others enjoy finding. Spencer and I continued searching the woods and we had a pretty productive spot along the creek bed there, where we found half a grocery sack or so worth of morels all amongst a set of five or six dead elm trees. We planned on coming back here in a couple of days and striking it, hopefully, better as we would allow more time for the big, yellow mushrooms to come up.