By a long and winding road Mike Hopping became an amateur mycologist and coauthor with Alan & Arleen Bessette of A Field Guide to Mushrooms of the Carolinas and A Field Guide to the Mushrooms of Georgia. A short pants penchant for fossils morphed into a decade of interest in Missouri mammals, a shutterbug itch, a medical career, then writing. It was a carelessly discarded orange peel that tipped me to the location of a morel motherlode and wonder about what else I’d been walking past all these years.