Valwyn, old cars and another medal

Val and Alwyn arrived amazingly early, taking a ridiculous 75 minutes all the way from the airport.  I suppose traffic must have been very light, but the condition of the roads must have had to slow them down a bit. The whole of Tuesday was spent geocaching, first in the village and its environs then a bit further afield in the afternoon.

This photo was taken in the stream valley above the village en route to part 3 of the multicache that I put out about 18 months ago in Ber. They were very clever and found everything very quickly. As this one was not on the geocaching.com site, I  decided that no matter how hard (I've  tried before and failed) it is to get an account on the .com site I'll persevere this time, so they can log their find.

After lunch we drove to within a half mile of this amazingly beautiful lake which was the result of quarrying in the past. Once work stopped the old quarry filled with water, making it a favourite picnic and swimming spot. As you can see the sides of the lake are pretty straight up and Alwyn managed to scramble up on the side you are looking at.  Val and I chose a slightly less hairy route by retracing our steps and climbing up more gently in forest. Alwyn found the cache first, then Val and finally my good self. This one is actually already on the .com site, so we could all log it on our return to base.  The evening  was first spent with some desperate efforts to get registered on the site (successful!!) then trying to put my caches on (unsuccessful!!). Dinner, which was expertly prepared by Roy compensated for our failure and made me even more determined to succeed next time.

On Wednesday morning Alwyn and Roy have taken the bikes to bits and packed them up, while I showed Val about the 'estate'.  While it is the prettiest in the summer, it managed to show its picturesque side this time as well.  With the autumnal hues and its views from the top end in enchanted Val, who thought it was a lot bigger and impressive than expected.

Once the bikes were done Val, Alwyn and I walked up to the andesite outcrop and - of course - the compulsory photo of sitting on the rocks with the 'tits' in the background was taken. Below where they are sitting and behind them is the world famous phenomenon of the bent andesite columns, which they both found unique, as they really are. More worryingly, there is a building being built slap bang in the middle of the forest right at the foot of the columns, which is outrageous and even if it is not private, but a visitors' centre or some such supposedly beneficial development, we all thought it was not exactly in keeping with the atmosphere of the place and endangering its protected status.

They left us around 4.30pm, arrived in plenty of time at the airport and complete with two bikes were at home before too late in the evening. After their departure I had another go at putting my caches on the .com site and succeeded!!! Since then they logged my multi and the quarry lake, but unfortunately couldn't log the one by the andesite columns as that one is not on the site.  Perhaps I might convince its owner to put it on and I might even offer to translate for him/her?

And then we returned to town. I insisted that Roy comes with me to see the 'Oldtimer Show' which is held every year in a big exhibition/sports hall and is jam packed full of veteran, vintage and just old vehicles of all sorts. Initially he was a bit grumbly, because the hall didn't look big enough and the vehicles fancy enough for his liking and especially didn't seem to justify the high entrance tickets.  However, as he got into it he was beginning to love it more and more. If you take the very strict British definition of 'veteran' there were not too many of those, but the special attraction to me was the presence of Eastern Block vintage vehicles of all sorts.  Not only Trabant, but Moskvich, Wartburg, Tchaika, UAZ and many, many others.  There were also a good few static engines (working on compressed air, rather than steam), some of which came a long way.

This one was made in Britain, but the exhibitor got it in Serbia. We saw it work as well and it looked a million dollars.  He was asking if we knew anyone who would want to buy it, but we don't.  Should you know otherwise, let us know! Of course, there were many, many fancy motorcars as well as commercial vehicles on show. I loved the Russian copies of Opels, which you would have only found out on very close inspection.

Which one's the fake? The blue one in the background or the grey one in the foreground?

This bike was one of Roy's favourites of the many there, mostly because of the JAP engine.  Otherwise, the maker was a small outfit called Meray, but the engine had to be British.

And finally, the one I'd really like and not because it is posh, but because of the engineering excellence that Rolls Royce had always menat. And then on Saturday we were off orienteering again.  It was quite a long way off, so we bought a month's motorway pass and pootled down much faster than we normally do. Roy complained about the monotony and I think he has a point.  People often ask why we don't buy motorway passes and it isn't that we don't want to spend the money it is the monotony that we dislike.

With the weather hot enough to be the height of summer I suffered a bit on the soft sand and the heat, but enjoyed it a lot.  This part of the sandy lowlands I have never been to and they turned out to be more technical than I thought they would. I had to run W55 as that was the oldest female class, but managed to beat allcomers on day 1, some of them a lot younger than me, including some Finns. One of the Finnish ladies seemed ever so familiar and only when she came up and said that we met in Scotland at the 6-days in 2011 did I twig.

Day two the course was a bit longer and I, foolishly, didn't hydrate as well as I did the day before.  So I was struggling even more than on Saturday although having made no mistakes it seemed that others were even slower, or perhaps were making mistakes.  I ended up with a nice big book, a certificate and a gold medal. Roy started making hints at requesting me to slow down even further as there is no more space on the stick I hang my medals on.  Ahhhhh! That definitely gave me a chance for a hidden boast! :-)

Currently we are in town and planning to stay until next Monday. Tomorrow I'm going geocaching with Andor and tonight I am going to the Opera for a concert with Robert.  Hopefully one or two visits to the baths can be fitted in later on in the week and then there is some more orienteering at the weekend.

Autumn colours, more walnuts and apples, BK concert and a medal (or two)

On Tuesday we arrived back in the village.  The sight that welcomed us was magnificent. First of all the roses were still in glorious bloom, but then we realised that in the back autumn had arrived.  Many of the trees were changing colours and out came the camera.

One interesting event this week was that I got interviewed by a researcher from the Wellcome Foundation about my memories of the fight against polio in Hungary in the 1950's and 60's. She asked lots of questions over the phone and we chatted for almost 2 hours.  Apparently they are running a magazine and I will be in it. The work in the garden is still pretty ferocious. We are still collecting and burning walnut leaves; we are still picking up walnuts, harvesting apples and pears and making apple sauce. One day Roy made a dozen bottles of apple sauce and I harvested the mint and made two bottles of mint sauce. On Saturday we had our gardener in to mow the grass and having picked up the walnut leaves he could make mulch out of the grass cuttings and the other (non poisonous) leaves for covering the roses and strawberries with for winter.

Saturday was probably the highlight of the week. We were expecting friends for the weekend to stay with us for the Orienteering Championships which was held about 35 miles up the road. However, Klari discovered that there was a concert on Saturday night where our beloved Kristof Barati was playing along with the pianist, Gergely Boganyi about 25 miles in the other direction, but about half way between town and the village.  So, we worked it out that both of us could go to it and then return together to us in the village for an overnight stay prior to the orienteering.  We also invited one other person to come to the concert who was staying for the weekend anyway, thus the three of us enjoyed an absolutely glorious time listening to that heavenly Stradivarius and its master playing Bach, Beethoven, Bartok and Franck.  Ahhhhh!!

And now we come to the orienteering. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. And although the start was 2km and 220m of climb away I have even got a minibus ride up halfway, so I only had to walk 1km and 100m of climb. I had a good run, although no. 1 was a bit of a problem and not only for me. We all thought the map was not exactly how it should have been at that point. Never mind.  I got a bronze medal, which was only one of three medals I took home. Other than the bronze in the championship I got a silver in the combined championship of 2013 in W65 plus a gold medal (albeit made of pottery) for my win two weeks ago.  That was the event when we had to leave early and Kriszti had just brought it along today.  Together with my prize of a superb bottle of red wine which is going to be drunk on a special occasion later on in the year.

Now we are expecting Alwyn and Val tomorrow as they are returning for their bikes and staying for just under 48 hours.  If the weather is decent on Tuesday I'll take them off for a spot of geocaching.  That should be fun!!

Vilmos Aba-Novák exhibition and the Army Half marathon in Ottawa

A quick postscript to last weekend's post: just before we leave for the village again I went to see an exhibition in one of the newly opened local authority galleries.  Local Authorities are no longer in the business of providing galleries, so this made a pleasant change that they decided to renovate a few rooms in one of the poorer districts of the city and call it an educational/cultural centre.  The biggest room of the complex is the gallery.  The Grand Opening (which was a fortnight ago and which I didn't attend) included a show of 31 paintings plus a set of prophets' heads on wood by a very interesting and in some respects controversial painter by the name of Vilmos Aba-Novák. He lived from 1894 to 1941, produced exellent etchings in his youth, then started painting in oils first, later in pastels and with those he combined the stylistic elements of both expressionism and the Italian novecento. In the last decade of his life he produced many grandiose frescos both in religious and secular settings. Unfortunately they didn't have any more copies of the catalogue, most of which went on the first day, but nobody stopped me photographing, so I have quite a few snapshos of the paintings on show. It didn't take me long, but it awakened my interest in him and I think I might organise a trip to one of his major fresco sites in the future.

The Army Half Marathon in Ottawa took place a good few weeks ago, but Delaney had just put three pictures up on Facebook which I absolutely love.  Every single one is executed expertly, not only in terms of the quality of them, but the insight they all show of the mood and personality of their subjects. Superb photography, Delaney!!

 Testdriving my future car!

 The superfit heroes of the day!

Waiting for Mummy to finish the race!

Welcome to Xander Emil Grant!

There he is. Looks a bit like Stephen did when newborn. Very sweet expression and looks funny in big brother's clothes which are obviously far too big. He weighed 6lb 10oz which is about average, but it seems that after having had a little giant in Elian Mummy and Daddy are worried about him.  He'll catch up in no time, I'm sure.

We are going to visit them at the end of November, I can't wait to see him. He'll be about 6 weeks old by then, which is just the right time to visit, I think.  Hopefully everybody will be over the initial tiredness and we'll be able to help as well.

Stephen still looks pretty tired in the first picture, but the smile in the second tells it all.  Proud father with two gorgeous sons, he should be happy!!

Not much else to report since my last post.  We have been away in the South orienteering, which I enjoyed tremendously.  As I didn't have a team I had to run the Open Short Course on both days and loved it.  This is an interesting sand dunes type terrain, which amazingly I have not yet competed on. The forest was just starting to change colour (see above!) and the sun was shining brightly. I took it carefully, although you'll see that on Day 1 I went too far left en route to Control 1, no matter how careful I thought I was.  The rest went reasonably well.  Today, on Day 2 things were going quite well until Control 11 when I suppose I had oxygen starvation to the brain and wasted about 2-2 1/2 minutes doing a headless chicken act.  Still, my times were not bad on two days when the general consensus of opinion was that all courses were too long.

Day 1 was 4.2k which took me an hour. Admittedly I took it easy as there was no point in rushing and these type of very technical areas require a slow and careful getting used to the map and the planning at the start. There were some very soft open sandy bits too, which are very tiring, but on the whole I was pleased with my run.  The main complaint (apart from the length) was the poor printing quality causing difficulty of seeing the contour lines.  They were far too faint and on such intricate dunes they were important to see.  The only good thing I can think of is that having scanned it, the trek stands out.

Day 2 was only 3.5k, which took me 48 minutes, but we had some excitement at the beginning caused by the failure of the start box.  Absolutely typical that nobody tested it. As it happens, I don't care, I have my GPS watch to tell me everything I want to know, but still, bad show. I didn't even get a printout of my splits (not even from control 1) because they ran out of paper. Now that is worse than bad show, that is downright negligence, but who am I to complain?

In spite of all this I enjoyed myself this weekend, with a new grandson and two reasonably good runs and fantastic weather with sunshine in the 20's, not to mention the fantastic dinner (see Roy's heart attack cocktail!) at our favourite inn, it was a good'un. It also showed that I am slowly recovering from the injuries of early season and the resultant lack of fitness, so that was a plus point too.

More chores

I know that I posted as little as three days ago, but this week is so busy that most days we do enough to fill an entire post.

Here we are wrapping our apples in tissue paper and putting them away in banana boxes in the food store in the Bunkhouse for winter.  Whether they will survive or not is anybody's guess. I know that Golden Delicious keeps, but the others, I have no idea. I believe the others are Gala, Jonagold, Idared and Starking, so if anybody who reads this and can give some assistance as to which should be eaten now and which can be kept for later, I would be very grateful for the information. :-)

The walnut leaf pick-up and burn is coming to an end thankfully. As we have 8 large walnut trees, that's a hell of a lot of leaves.  Apparently they poison the ground, so they have to be picked up and burnt.

In the meantime we had some planting to do. After the shopping at Tescos on Monday we spotted a really nice florist who was getting ready for the chrisanthemum, aster and heather season mostly associated with All Souls' Day on 2nd November.  So, I bought 4 asters and with the two heathers that were bought some time ago we decided to prettify my parents' grave. It looks quite nice, doesn't it? Unfortunately on All Souls' Day I will be orienteering in some forest somewhere, but we can always light the candles early, can't we?

Yesterday Roy had to  carry on in the garden without me as I got stuck into the Tax Returns.  This was the first time I did them online and it is no bother, no bother at all. A friend, who had always done them online encouraged me by promising that it is really straightforward and with plenty of chances to correct mistakes, and he was right. I have done both, submitted them both and will probably ring them next week about a couple of things that are still not entirely clear to me.  Last time I did that I got a really delightful young woman at the other end of the phone, who was not only helpful and cheerful, but very knowledgable as well. Oh, and I found a big booboo in one of the help boxes that you can get from clicking on a circle with a question mark in. They are usually quite helpful, but this particular one was the only one (as far as I could see) that they failed to update to this year's version, so it was still talking about 2011-12 and 2012-13 instead of 2012-13 and 2013-14. In my feedback I mentioned it and I wonder if they will do anything about it?

I did also watch quite a few TV progs on iPlayer, so I am more or less up to date with myself. It is interesting how we don't watch TV at all in the summer and then autumn comes and all the ones we love are back, so you have to keep on top of them. First it was Downton, now Homeland and hopefully in the not too distant future it will be Sherlock.

The only chore which still awaits is that of cracking walnuts. It is a monotonous job, but can't be avoided if we want to eat walnuts.  We have about 4 large and several small sackfuls of them, so I think I will depart now in search of a wooden hammer and some nuts.

Orienteering, wood chopping, a severe frost and the apple harvest

We left off last time hoping that the guy chopping up our firewood would do his duties.  Well, he did them exceedingly well as you can see. Admittedly, at the back of all these columns of neatly stashed cut logs there was about one row of old stuff, but even allowing for that we realised that we were probably diddled last time.  I am sure we paid for 5 cubic metres even then, but that lot was nowhere near the quantity we received this time. Never mind! That should do us for a few winters and we not only didn't have to cut it up, but it got stashed safely for us.

 

 Last Thursday night I went to my first opera performance of this season.  It was Verdi's Falstaff and I must admit I didn't like it. Admittedly it was Verdi's last opera, composed not long before his death, but that should not have made any difference.  Also, it was a comic opera, which normally is not my cup of tea anyway. The performance as such was not too bad.  The production was one of those 'in vogue' modernised versions, but that didn't bother me, just the whole thing didn't grab me at all.

On Friday we slowly pootled down South, trying a different route from our usual ones. As it happens, it simply didn't matter which way we went, the distance was the same to the kilometre. Next time we'll try the M6 and A6 plus the extra 15km up into the hills and see if that comes out at 219km as well? Our usual hotel happened to be the event centre as well this time, so we were really close to the Finish, Start and all amenities. I love all those sinkholes and had a lovely time.

Day 1 was a Middle Distance Event, so I only had 1.8k with 50m of climb, which was silly.  However, I must admit, all that climbing into and out of large sinkholes did add to the climb. As there was not much competition there I safely won.  Day 2 was a bit more of a physical challenge. 3.1k with 125m of climb. Unfortunately I forgot to put my GPS watch on in time for it to pick up the satellites before my start, so this route is drawn in the old fashioned way by hand. I won that day as well, but unfortunately we couldn't wait for the medal ceremony as we were invited to dinner by Nata and Colin and had to dash off.  My friend Kriszta who came second behind me promised to pick up my goodies and bring them next weekend. The route home was uneventful and we got home in good time.

Dinner with Nata and Colin is always a hoot. I got a lovely trout, the rest of them had cottage pie. I stayed off the wine as I was driving but I still had a good time.  We presented Nata and Colin with a pot of rhubarb which I hope they planted promptly as the last few nights in the village were well below zero and it will not be long before winter arrives in town too.

We shopped at Tesco en route to the village and Roy actually suggested that we buy me some roses.  That is a rare gesture, so I was suitably impressed with the offer and helped myself to two bunches, one red and one yellow.  They really look lovely! In front of them is a picture frame with plants I have recently pressed.  The one on the left is one of my own roses, but the one on the right is the more interesting one. I was walking uphill to the top of the garden the other day, when I looked down and there, right in front of my foot was a four leaf clover. Whether it will bring me luck or not I don't know, but I thought it could only help if I pressed it and put it into a frame.

We got home just after 11am. We had a small shock at seeing the aftereffects of the frosty nights we managed to miss. I reckon it was a frosty wind, as quite a lot of stuff suffered in the garden.  All three basil plants have completely died.  That is a crying shame, but such is life. Thankfully, the rest of the herb patch escaped unscathed. The few remaining tomatoes were all mushy, no good for anything.  Practically every walnut leaf was on the ground, so Roy and I spent most of the day raking them together and burning them.  This is quite urgent as they are forecasting rain and once they get wet, there is no way of shifting them, never mind burning them. A few of the pleasurable tasks included harvesting all our apples. (see above!) I have a feeling that some of the very low hung small ones had also been damaged by the frost, as I ate a couple which showed a small amount of mushiness and browning in the core.  Still, that will just give us an excuse to eat them quickly, which is OK with both of us! :-) As you can see the apple harvest was pretty good. The ones in the whicker basket are off a very old tree which has never produced a tenth of this much in any year before. The rest was from 5 small trees that we planted 6 years ago.  I still haven't found out which ones would keep over the winter and which ones have to be eaten and or preserved fast, but I suppose this time round we will try the method of trial and error.

And finally, how about this fantastic photo that I have discovered again on FB, reposted from the album of the Medves Plateau Photo Marathon of the summer.  The main significance is not that it is a phenomenal picture, but that when the kids were over here in July we took them to the one in the foreground. It was a lovely outing and it brought back good memories. The one in the background all lit up is appr. a mile and a half from it as the crow flies, but the photographer's lens makes it look as if it was just there a 100 or so feet away.

We're here until Friday, so this week will be busy.  The leaf raking/burning has to be finished, we have to plant the asters and heathers that we have decided to put round my parents grave before the heavy frosts or they will not take, the cracking of walnuts has to be an ongoing task, otherwise we'll never get to the end of them, and I'm sure there will still be a few end of season gardening chores to be done.  Indoors the Tax Returns await my pleasure (you must be joking!!), I now have a few books and magazines to read, a good few DVD's to watch, and then I have not mentioned all the TV programs I missed while away to be watched on iPlayer. Speak to you sometime next week I expect! :-)