An eventful week! So what's new?

On the Monday after the Mecsek Cup I went to see a fascinating film followed by an excellent concert. My friend Klari and I saw The Door with Helen Mirren and Martina Gedeck, which was superb. Helen Mirren looked absolutely authentic as a Hungarian char woman of the 1960's. The story is from Magda Szabo and the director was Istvan Szabo. The acting, the script, the photography, the millieu and atmosphere, as well as the insight into the human condition just blew me away. If you have a chance to see it, GO!!!

In the evening we went to see the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing the Beethoven violin concerto with Kristof Barati as the soloist plus the New World Symphony. You don't have to be a fan of Kristof Barati to have been on cloud 9 during this concert. Charles Dutoit is a superb conductor and while we were up in the gods the music was all round us.

Tuesday I had an appointment with my solicitor, so we stayed in town, took it easy and having sorted the legal matters we departed for the country with Andor in tow. He was coming down to help me sort my first geocache and then stay for the Extra Long Distance Championships. On Wednesday we walked around the village, took the co-ordinates of all the places where my multicache would go and even found an excellent location for the actual box. On Thursday we drove to my little valley and actually placed the box and the present for the first finder, which was fun.

On our return I started constructing my web page for the cache, which turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I have to learn HTML coding for this, plus a special type of coding that was invented by the geocaching web site for the co-ordinates to be downloadable. I rang my nephew who gave me some help and I also found an extremely helpful page on the net on HTML.

On Friday the event organisers started arriving. By the evening our little estate was accommodating a reasonably high number of people. The Bunkhouse had more than its usual capacity of 1o, so some had to sleep on the floor, I think. In the Farmhouse there was the three of us and in the Kottage three orienteering friends who were also competing. I also managed to finish the cache web page and even tested it by cut and pasting it into this blog to see if the HTML codes would work. They did!! The only codes that didn't work (in fact, they didn't even appear in any shape or form!) were the special ones which obviously only work on the actual geocaching web site.

And then today we went orienteering. Or to be more exact, first went to photograph the mass start of the M/W18's, M/W20's and M/W21's. There was a fierce debate about the mass start principle beforehand, but it sure looked entertaining to watch.

I don't think that there were more than 10% of the competitors who bothered to look at their map before running off in any direction. After a while there was a mass of confused orienteers in the field sorting themselves into groups leaving in any old direction, which made it positively entertaining to watch.

My course was great. I really enjoyed it, even though the terrain was full of thorn bushes, steep, stone strewn hillsides, rocks and thick jungle like vegetation in places. It was quite gruelling with its 3900m and 200m of climb. It felt like I was proceeding like an asthmatic snail at the beginning. I have even forgot to start my GPS watch, so the actual track only goes from control 1. As soon as the relentless climb eased I started feeling more energetic and I think my route choices were quite OK. I finally managed a third place and a bronze medal, which was very pleasing. Especially that I was only slightly down on second and less than 3 minutes on the winner.

It is amazingly quiet in the house at the moment. Most of the organisers have gone home either straight from the event or after a short pack up in the Bunkhouse. Marci and his Dad will be staying as he promised me a bit of a clean up in the house tomorrow. Roy cooked me a big bowl of rice with veg, which was delicious and I think my next bit of activity will involve a bit of a snooze in front of the TV. Ahhhhh!!