Gardening, orienteering and geocaching [in other words a normal week:-)]

It is still very busy in the garden, even though it is now November.  I still haven't got round to covering up my roses, although there is no panic as the weather is amazingly mild still. The latest is that having quite accidentally met a guy from a neighbouring village who was selling fruit trees a few weeks back while walking around the village with Val and Alwyn, finally we ran into him again en route to orienteering on Saturday. We arranged buying two pear, one nectarine and one apricot tree which he duly delivered on Monday. I also bought 15 raspberry bushes from him so today Roy was planting the raspberries and tomorrow Sanyi is coming to dig the holes for the trees. I couldn't get any peat and manure in Tesco yesterday, so we will have to do with the bag we have.

The orienteering was in quite reasonable weather and there were three runs in two days. The above  map is of the Saturday morning run in Eger and the first 8 controls were in free order. 39 was the one that foxed most people.  It took a while to spot that the flag was on the other side of the high fence, which in fact was a high wall, so you couldn't see through it. Tricky bit of fun that was.

This is Saturday afternoon's course, which was a lot more primitive, in effect a street run with very little navigation in it. Unfortunately my 5th control wasn't there, but fortunately I found the tag, so I went on.  Apparently they found it about 50 metres away, but once the tag is found you stop looking, don't you? The weather stayed fair and we had a reasonable night in the hostel.  Unfortunately our favourite restaurant was having a bad night with extremely noisy children everywhere and even worse service.  We had to wait nearly an hour just for the soup and more than an hour for the main course.  We were about to leave when it turned up.

And on Sunday we attacked the steep hills in even better weather, in spite of the dire forecast. I thought this was quite good, even though I was nearing 20 minute km's. That's mostly due to my unfitness, but also the horrendous climb. The map could have been better in places, but all in all it was a fun weekend.

And then Monday came and I went to the Great Plains with Andor to visit a church (see above!) where Vilmos Aba-Novak painted some amazing frescoes in the 1930's.  This was initially a cultural trip to look at the frescoes and - of course - Andor brought his camera stand to take some nice pictures.  Then we went to recce the village where a geocache could be placed, found the place and placed a microcache in a clever and tricky hideout.  I am not letting on where, just in case any of my readers want to go and find it for themselves! :-)

This is Andor's photo of the chancel and the chancel arch which are covered in Aba-Novak's frescoes. Apparently he incorporated many people he met in the village in the frescoes, including the then vicar, the person who commissioned the frescoes, the local shopkeeper, the local apothecary and finally himself.

Christ with his warning fingers. I find his almost caricature faces amusing. I wonder if this was the face of someone in the village?

This is hell on the right half of the chancel arch. The left one of two guys in the bottom right hand corner is the shopkeeper, who apparently used to cut up the end of the salami into the painter's breakfasts and that is why he was painted in a less than attractive manner. The one on the right was the apothecary who having admitted to being a mixer of poisons reckoned he'd go to hell for sure and didn't mind being depicted as such.

 Christ's right hand as saying stop to evil. Many of the saints  are also wearing the faces of the locals, some of whom were up in arms about their frescoes, petitioning for their removal, but the bishop and even the Pope declined to agree.

This is an image of the painter himself. Apparently he always put himself into his works of art, although never in a central or important position. After we finished inside the church and placed my third cache we got back into the car to find some caches in the neighbouring villages. The plan was originally to find 6, but the weather turned really rainy and cold, so we just did 4.  Also, those other 2 were at the end of 3 and 4 mile long drives on unmade, very muddy and narrow roads, so I wasn't going to risk my car's bodily integrity just for a couple of caches.  Although, we did decide that we will have to come back next summer, as both caches, especially the one nearthe recently renovated ancient chapel, really interested both of us.

The first cache we found was behind this lovely old chateau, which currently is the Police Museum, but having closed for the winter we couldn't see it.  We found the cache though in a small woodland behind it.

In the next village we visited there was this impressive early 19th century stone bridge, which is still used for through traffic and the cache was very near it by the river. The description on the net said that you will need half a litre of water to get at the cache. Roy immediately worked out, long before I left home, that it must be down something, possibly a pipe where you can pour the water in and that will float the cache to the top.  That is exactly what's happened. Very clever, I like tricky, but not impossible hides like this was.

And finally we got to the nearby biggish town to find two caches, one of them a multi. This picture was taken in the main square where part 1 of the multi was. We then found the second part easily, while the third part, the cache itself was missing, as it has been for months, but we could work the password out virtually.  By then it was still raining on and off and was getting dark.  We hesitated whether to risk getting benighted in a thick forest on the floodplains of the local river in search of the next cache, but eventually went for it.  We took the car as close to the cache as the Tom Tom would lead us and then walked the remaining 300 metres. It was dead easy, as it was exactly where it said: about 7m from the bank in a very large hole in a thick old tree.  On the way out we almost ran so that we could see where we put our feet. Since then the moderators have got to work and I hope that my latest, (3rd) cache will be published on both geocaching sites soon.

The rest of the week is being spent in the village, to be followed by a trip into town on Friday, after which we go orienteering for the last time this year, as the season closer is this coming weekend on my beloved sand dunes in the South. The week after that we are staying in town as plenty of things await our attention.  The trip to visit little Xander is approaching, I can't wait!