A murky hike

We went to have an outing and a hike today, in spite of the dreadful weather. We both looked like drowned rats when we got back, but still felt really good. Before the story of today I must comment on the first picture as it has just turned up from my telephone while downloading the rest of the photos. About a couple of weeks ago we went to Hatvan to do some shopping and discovered this lovely ancient fire engine b y the market. Roy looks happy, doesn't he?

Philip's few days are going fast and it looks as if all of it will be really rainy. So when it eased a bit this morning around 11am we set out to Buják to have a look at the medieaval castle ruin. We even managed to get Roy to climb up there with us (see photo), which was amazing. Unfortunately there is no information up there about the ruins, no history, no map or any other detail whatsoever. That is a shame, because it must have had a turbulent history over the centuries, but I suppose I can always look it up on the net. Afterwards we got Roy to drive us to my favourite lookout tower (see photo) which was closed again. Roy drove home and Philip and I went to explore the closed tower. Apparently it was built around 1920 by a countess whose family used it as a lookout place and hunting lodge. After the war it started to fall apart until at around the year 2000 at the instigation of some German or Austrian man (possibly a distant relative of the countess) some money was found to restore it. It looks magnificent, but it seems very underused and I am yet to find it open. You can see from the picture what the weather was like, although thankfully it didn't rain at that point. I think we were in cloud.

The hike was quite straightforward after the tower, although at some of the path junctions we had to guess as the map we had was old and rather inaccurate. Once home we checked our route on Google Earth and it was really spot on. We had to decide when to turn right and I think we made the right choice. We didn't get home until about 3.30pm, dripping from head to foot, but happy.

Tomorrow it is the Italian Grand Prix, so I don't think I will be going out much, or if we do, we'll have to be back by 2pm. The weather forecast is better for tomorrow, so we will see.