Back in the village

When we got back home last Wednesday, the grass was terribly high, but still within a manageable state. We started mowing straight away and are still doing it a week later. The trouble is that not all of the garden is accessible for the tractor, so other parts have to be mowed by a hand pushed mower plus the edges by the strimmer. We are both getting too old for this and are thinking of employing a gardener.  If we can find one, that is.

The lovely Brazilian tablecloth

Then on Thursday the long-awaited tablecloth arrived from Brazil. This was a such a saga! Roy did some family history research for a lady in Sao Paulo and she sent me this ethnic piece of handicraft as away of saying thank you. It must have cost her a fortune to send, as it came by DHL. They were quite co-operative as regards to delivery and allowed us to change it three times.  Due to our itinerant lifestyle we changed it from the village to town and back again, before we got it last Thursday.  It was, and still is, gorgeous.  Such a beautiful piece of embroidery and crochet work, that I will have to look after it carefully, to make sure it stays beautiful.

The glorious panorama near the moving cache

The rest of the week was interspersed by little outings and then hiding from the heat indoors and resting.  The weather has gone completely crazy - I have never seen such a heatwave in April before. But, of course, there is no such thing as global warming or damage to the ozone layer, is there?

The site of one cache I didn't find

Other than mowing and watering the garden, the other activity this week concerned geocaching, what else? However, before that I had a few miserable days with a very nasty sore throat, followed by what seemed like a plague of mouth ulcers. I am still certain that all this had something to do with my endoscopy, but finally (and not until after I realised what a boon in such situations can mouthwash be) have I sufficiently recovered to go out.

The village blow us from the lookout tower

First little trip out included a visit to a moving cache and the finding of another two ordinary caches. The second outing included placing the moving cache in another place and trying to survey 3 more springs, not all of which was successful. Unfortunately the springs in Nógrád are much neglected. The hills and forests, as well as most of the villages, are very pretty, but poor on the whole. Somehow the traditions of care and maintenance of natural phenomena, like springs and wells, has long ago gone by the wayside, so an increasing number of springs that I visited were dry, neglected, often completely collapsed. At this rate my series of 11 springs might end up as 6 or 7, although somebody suggested that I adopt some already existing, but neglected, caches by springs into my series and thus save them. I might have to do that, we'll see.

Pretty wild flower

Currently I am writing up lists of geocaches that I will go and try to find in May.  There is a silly number of geocaching trips coming up, as May seems to be very popular all round for caching. This weekend we are off to the peninsula of Tihany, for a geocaching hike that I have been organising and staying all weekend with our friend Pityu. We are also caching en route down to Pityu's place, so that needed a list.

One of the picturesque, but neglected springs

Next Monday I am going on a hike with Ros and Ian, as we have not spent much time with them lately and I thought to take them to a part of the Buda hills where I have never been before and where there are 4 caches I haven't yet got. That was the second list.

A hunting lodge in the form of a tower

Following that Monday, I am off to the Tisza Lake with Mariann on Thursday to do some caching en route down (list for that trip is still to be written) and then have a motorboat trip on the lake in search of water-borne geocaches.  That'll be a first for me, and I feel very excited about it. Once we finished there, Mariann is going home and I will be picked up by Gyuri, coming up from Békéscsaba, en route to the Geocaching Festival just above Eger. There we will cache for about a day and a half, after which Gyuri goes home and so do I, except this time by train or bus. The list for this trip will, hopefully, be put together by Gyuri.

Another lovely wild flower

The weekend following that one, I am away for 4 days (Thursday to Monday) also for the purposes of caching, this time in the West of the country, so you can appreciate that I have a lot of lists to do. I asked Gyuri to take on the Festival list, but offered to do the one for those 4 days the following week. So paper-work at the moment is rather heavy, and then came the call from London, would I do some transcription work on a video? Of course I will, I can never resist helping them, I suppose that is why they always call me when they get stuck.

The path on which I returned from the last (non-existent) spring

Must go now, as my head is hitting the keyboard.  I have been up since 4am, so it is time I hit the sack. Next post hopefully after the weekend.