The House at Poo(h) Corner

Lovers of Winnie the Pooh would know about the relevance of the title. Or would they? I am sorry to have to say that this particular corner was called this more due to the 'h'-less variety of the said word than with an 'h'. But let's start at the beginning! We went East last weekend to do some O. It was supposed to be three short sprint courses (one on Saturday afternoon and two on Sunday) in preparation for the Short Distance Championship in two weeks' time. The trouble was, however, that my courses are usually quite short anyway, so they are fairly difficult to shorten much further, so I ended up with three almost full length courses to be done within just over 24 hours. Saturday's event was near Recsk, the site of an infamous Stalinist labour camp. The forest was rough with a fair amount of climb and the temperature was in the high 30's Celsius. Imagine trying to run in that! I nearly died, I couldn't run at all and towards the end I could hardly walk, as it was uphill all the way. I enjoyed the course, it was very good, just could not cope with the heat. Needless to say I came 4th out 4, although another excuse might be that I was the only one over 60, with the other 3 considerably younger than myself.

Afterwards we motored to the town where Sunday's events were held, did some shopping and found our accommodation in the centre of the town. It was in a lovely old 18th century building which is used for high school students in term time. We had to share an 8 person dorm with 4 other orienteers, which would have been OK, but one of them kept shutting the door for reasons of either noise or light and both of us were just suffocating in the stuffy, hot and sticky room. With the door open there was a little breeze, but with it shut we were just wallowing in our own perspiration, which is not my idea of fun. In the evening we went and did some geocaching (again) and had dinner in Old Jack's Pub, which we knew from before. The following morning I managed to strain some muscles in my back, so it didn't look like a very happy weekend all round. And now back to the reference of The House at Poo(h) corner. The finish area was on a sportground with ZERO shade. Roy went on strike and found himself a nice shady corner a 100 yards outside the ground. Which would have been fine, except it turned out to be a much favoured dog toilet, with appropriate little deposits and the accompanying smell. Thankfully Roy's nose is non functional, but mine works just fine. I couldn't really join him after my run for longer than a few minutes, I'm afraid.

After this town run I wasn't feeling too good. We had some more caches to collect and had to do some food shopping too, so I accepted the sad truth with some resignation and gave up the third run. With my back hurting and the promised cold front nowhere near, I really didn't feel like doing any more running. The town of Eger is quite impressive, it has a Bishop and the corresponding Cathedral, it has a famous Castle and a few really beautiful churches. It also has thermal waters, which we didn't have time to visit this time, but got near to doing the gaocaching. The total for the weekend was 4 caches, with a real find of a beautiful Orthodox Catholic Church which is the biggest and most beautiful of its kind in the country.

The iconostasis, which is basically in the place of where the altar usually is in other churches was superb. Lots of hand painted icons set in wooden, hand carved frames, taking up the entire space between the floor, walls and the ceiling. The state of the church is not too good as they can't afford to renovate it at present, and what little money they do have is spent on restoring the icons, rather than the walls and the fabric of the church.

Just in case anybody is wondering what the minaret is doing amongst the pictures: it was one part of a multicache and its origins go back to the 16th century when the town fell to the Turks who then stayed for 150 years. One of the most favourite books I have ever read was "The Stars of Eger", which was set in the 16th century and told the story of how a small band of heroes defended the Castle from the Turks. It didn't fall at that time, only a few years later. Finally, we went to Tesco's en route home and arrived back around 5pm, when theoretically I should have still been pounding the tarmac of Eger, but I wasn't!! :-) Finally, the much promised cold front did arrive, in the form of a drop in temperature of 10 degrees Celsius in a couple of hours. No wonder the Ambulance Service was rather busy this weekend, but at least we have had a really good night's sleep last night - the first one for weeks.