Geocaching, the £10 fine and the commie corner

Saturday was interesting. In the morning I managed to pay for the pálinka and it turned out to be only about £88, not double, as I anticipated. That would make it about £2.40 a litre which is very reasonable. No wonder there are so many alcoholics in these parts!! The problem now is what to do with this much booze? It's illegal to sell it, so Roy will have to imbibe considerably more often than he did this year and we can give some of it away as presents.

Then we departed to do some geocaching after a month long hiatus. The first cache was in a bear sanctuary which I never knew about and which was en route. Apparently when their previous place of residence got privatized and homelessness threatened all the teddy bears (who were the property of the state film company originally) and their keeper, another village offered them a bit of forest come scrub and they have lived there ever since.

Nowadays they have cattle, wolves, koati, racoons and all sorts of birds as well and operate like a Zoo. We took a couple of kilo of apples, as it was suggested on the geocaching web site that they love them. They did!! The cache itself was not very easy to find: I hate these 'at the bottom of a tree in a forest' type caches. We did about 4 circuits of that jungle like conifer patch before Roy spotted the sticks that hid it.

On our way to the next cache we saw these beautiful longhorn cattle grazing. It is an ancient breed and it is nice to see that some people still breed and keep them. The next cache was by a radio transmission tower where there was nothing special to look at other than the view. That, however, was 360 degree and spectacular. Finally, as the sun started to go down we went to find our last cache in a gorgeous old park by a lake. The whole place used to be a children's town, a real showcase in the old days, but getting quite delapidated nowadays. The park, however, with its 200+ year old plane trees was still magical.

Unfortunately the cache was gone - we found the place where it should have been and it looked as if somebody had taken delight in digging it out. Thankfully, the guy who placed it had written the password on the nearby little bridge's railing, so I could still log the find. This took me up to 146 finds, which is not bad, considering I have only really started geocaching just over a year ago. Today was another interesting day, but it didn't start very well. We found a parking ticket on the car to the tune of nearly £10. Saturday is usually free, but - unbeknown to us - it has been declared a working day on account of the Christmas holiday including a working day which nobody will have to do. This Saturday had to be worked in lieu and thus parking wasn't free between 8am and 6pm. Drat! I usually keep an eye on these silly things, but managed to miss it this time. Since then I found out that 15th December will be the same, this time for a day off over New Year.

Finally, I had another session at the baths, this time starting with the massage and then spending the rest of the time in the thermal waters. The good news was that the usual group of guys, whose company I really enjoy were there today in their "commie corner". They have - apparently - acquired this name for their political opinions, which also explains why I enjoy their company. Imre was pleased to see me, introduced me to the other fellows and during the couple of hours I spent with them we discussed, debated and sorted all manner of problems from the land question, through corruption and education all the way to the state of the world economy. I love them dearly and look forward to seeing them again in the coming weeks. If you look at the photo of the baths, they meet at the far left (very apt!) corner of this pool.