Back in the village

The day after we arrived back in the village we were both looking forward to a long stay, which was much overdue. Both the house and the garden needed a lot of attention and we set about gardening and tidying/cleaning as much as we could. The roses were in full bloom much earlier than usual, so we had to weed and water the roses, as well as do something about the greenfly and the black fly.

My favourite two-tone rose

The weather has gone really weird, heatwave one minute, deluge the next. This, needless to say, made the garden like a jungle, almost impossible to keep on top of the mowing and weeding. I have never seen the herb patch like it is this year.  Almost all of them have gone to seed and those that didn't were larger and more prolific than ever before. They usually look like this at the end of July or beginning of August. Amazing!

Plums, still green

Unfortunately, the fruit crop is not going to be amazing this year either.  But at least it looks as if there will be some. The hothouse atmosphere favours fungal infections, so one rose is already suffering from it and I fear for the fruit too.  And that's assuming there are no more thunderstorms or hailstorms this year. If you think of it, in April last year we lost all our fruit crop at the blossom stage due to a snowstorm.  This year April was like July, with heatwaves and drought. But, of course, there is no such thing as global warming. All a lefty invention indeed.

Mishka hussar and me

Feri, my geocaching friend from Pécs, invited me to cache with him on Saturday, as he was working close to town and wanted some company.  Originally I was supposed to go in on Friday evening, but the weather then turned really cold and rainy, so I thought I would leave the decision to Saturday morning, as I could catch an early bus and still be in town in time to meet Feri, should the weather improve.

Wildlife on a monoument

Thankfully, all the weather forecasts were wrong and there was no rain, but there was a lot of sunshine all day Saturday. In fact, it was back up into the 30's Celsius, so we sweated a lot. However, as it is about 5 or 6 months since I have seen Feri, I forgot how good a company he is.  He is awfully laid back, no ulterior motives, some chatter and a typical WYSIWYG type of fellow.

Millennial Monument

We changed the original caching plan, which had a lot of hiking type caches in it, to one where most of them were quite close to the car, should the skies open.  But they didn't. We ended up with nine caches at the end of the day, including a moving one.

The chateau with the wild park

The places visited included several round a biggish lake, a large metal statue of a hussar, a historical theme park, several walks around the ancient capital of the country, a lovely old chateau and its wild park, the moving cache that travels along the National Blue trail and finally a really weird place where the village bought an old metro carriage, painted it with psychedelic colours and erected it in the middle of the village as if it was coming out of the hill behind it. I love weird things and this looked really funny.

I stayed in the flat overnight and caught a really early bus on Sunday morning to be at home by breakfast. I watched the Monaco GP and felt sorry for Lewis for coming third, but loved every minute of it in spite of it being a boring procession in the first 2/3rd of the race. The last third was fascinating, although Lewis could not get ahead due to tyre worries and a few other problems. I loved that Ricciardo won, he is such a genuinely nice bloke.

The old metro carriage

This week is devoted to some housework, some gardening, but also a couple of days of caching. Not in the sense of looking for them, but actually getting on with my accursed spring series, which now feel that they would never be finished.  Unfortunately, spring after spring turns out to have either disappeared, or to have fallen down and be unusable, dried up and/or have other problems that make it not worthy of a cache.

The new lookout tower above the quarry

On Tuesday I went out with Roy, as not only the spring series was sitting on my conscience, but somebody nicked my cache I placed a couple of years ago just over the border, so I had to go and replace it with a new one. That done, I have then visited one of my adopted ones and improved it a bit, followed by another place which turned out to be neglected, dried up and no use for a cache.

Old fishing lake, now rather overgrown

At this place there was a dodgy looking dirt track which amazingly Roy was prepared to drive down on. I think we ended up with some scratched paint, due to Roy driving in the bushes, rather than falling into deep ruts. Still, while the drive in was exciting, the place was useless for a cache, so I am glad I didn't do miles of walking as well as end up with nothing.

The good news of the visit was that en route home we found a restaurant/pub in a village about half an hour or so from home, which we sort of knew, but never before stopped at.  It was brilliant! Nice ambience, friendly and efficient staff, good food at silly prices and draft beer at 80p a pint. No need to tell you that Roy was extremely happy. I offered to drive the rest of the way, so he had a gypsy roast with cucumber salad and TWO pints. Happy chappie indeed!

A happy Roy after a good lunch

Today was a busy household day: we did some cleaning, 3 lots of washing, I have filled our medicine boxes, popped down to the chemist in the next village for some of my medicines as well as for a quick shop for things that we have forgotten yesterday, and made my friend Klári's bed as she is coming out tomorrow.

The newly found pub

She had an operation some weeks back and while she is on her feet now, she still needs company to be around her. I invited her to come hiking with me, and as long as it is not too demanding, she said she would join me.  Roy is rather happy about this, as he would not have to come to my next geocaching outing. So  Klári and I are off tomorrow to visit the other adopted cache, which is pretty good, so it should not give me too much work, I hope, and then do another little hike from another village to a supposed spring, to see if that might be worthy of a cache.  My suspicion is that it will either not be there at all, or dried up and neglected, like so many others before it. We'll see - said the blind man!

Weather is still like in the palm house at Kew Gardens, but I am praying for some breeze tomorrow. Will report back on that trip in my next post. TTFN!