More sprint O, Stephen's wedding and Philip's visit

Long time no blogging. I have been hellishly busy, as you can see from the details below:
We had 10 visitors over the last weekend in preparation for a weekend of orienteering. The Sprint Championships was held just up the road in Salgótarján, so I invited a few friends to stay. The event went off really great, even though I had my doubts about starting orienteering after a gap of several months with a sprint event. As you read in the last post I was quite surprised how well I managed to run then, but I still ended up towards the bottom of the list. This weekend, however, ended up very different. While last weekend's race was not particularly technical and the emphasis was on running, the Sprint Champs definitely exercised the little grey cells. It started on very steep ground between tall blocks of flats and the average distance between controls was less than 100 metres. You really had to slow right down, look at the map very carefully and then run. Well, slide on your bottom, more like. They banned spikes, so we were tobogganing on our bums most of the time. It suited me fine and I ended up with a bronze medal. I was really chuffed, especially that the medals were designed by a local artist and I really fancied having one.

After that we all went home, had a big dinner together and then listened to Fruzsi's stories of the Trail-O European and World Championships. Her maps and courses were fascinating and the story of her 5th place in Trondheim was really heart warming.

Sunday we went up to the Matra to spectate at the National Harris Relay Championships, but the weather suddenly turned extremely windy and cold (it was 8 degrees Celsius on the top) so we scarpered to BP.

On Monday we were off to Stephen and Lucy's wedding, which was a delightful day. It was a joy to watch them so much in love and the happiness on everybody's face was infectious. We enjoyed our stay in the Hilton Metropole which was very comfortable and the Pavilion for a venue, followed by lovely nosh in Due South was delightful. We had to leave the party in the Komedia early due to our early flight the following morning, but it was a short and very happy trip.

Unfortunately our flight was a bit of a hassle with the plane developing a fuel leak and the need to spend the next 3 and half hours waiting for another one. The worry was about Philip arriving before us, but even that worked out just right. I compounded the problems by forgetting to take a phone charger and thus having a dying phone. On top of all that Philip never gave me his telephone number, so I couldn't ring him while the phone was still working, warning him about our delay. We arrived about 5.45pm, I turned the phone on and found just enough juice in it to ring Toncsi for a lift back to their place to pick up the car, when suddenly Philip rang. He has been waiting for about an hour and was concerned about the delay. I just managed to tell him to stay there and wait. Toncsi arrived a few minutes later, we went and picked Philip up, and finally even managed to get a nice dinner at David's before we all fell into bed exhausted.

Now we are in the village, where the weather has turned to real downpours, so apart from one very wet trudge to the andesite columns we have been housebound. Still, we all live in hope that it clears up and in the meantime we are spending most of our time on the net or in front of the TV.