Last Wednesday we had a lovely outing to the Buda hills in town. The list of caches you have found is broken down into 20 sections: the 19 counties and the capital. Many cachers have been to all the caches in their own county, so the percentage in that area is 100% for them. I have not had one like that for a long time, until one day I found that I had all the Budapest caches, so I finally got one area with 100. Until, that is, somebody put a new one out and I went down to 99%. So we had to go and get that new one to get back to 100%.
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| They had shelter and kept ammunition here |
We got up very early, as the heat wave was still with us, but it was still quite nice and cool when we started. The theme of this cache was about the "Defence line in the Buda hills", which is basically all the remnants of WW2, like trenches, underground ammunition dumps and the bases for anti-aircraft guns. It was actually quite an interesting hike, especially the ones I never knew were there. Roy helped me by delivering me by car to the start and then driving to the finish to pick me up again. I am very lucky having him, as most other people had to walk to the nearest transport or back to their own car at the start.
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| The state of my finds as of today |
This outing was also necessary for filling in my empty days on the table that shows how many days of the year I haven't yet geocached. Somebody thought up this silly table, where the months go down on the left and the days are in the top line. Each little square shows how many caches have you found on that particular day, ever since you started caching. So, the collection of 100% coverage is the aim in every month, and I am happy to report that I have 3 now. So, until I have got at least one cache in every little square in this table, I will have to go caching on all outstanding days with a bit fat zero in. Fun, isn't it?
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| Stephen Grant |
Thursday was Stephen's birthday, he is now 53, but I'm happy to say he does not look it. He is still a bit of a workaholic, which as he gets older will be very difficult to maintain. Still, it is his life, so while I quietly worry about him at times, I have no word in the matter whatsoever. I sent the money by BACS for presents for both him and Elian, and am currently awaiting his report of what they got with it. I suppose I'll have to wait for a while, as he is on a P&O cruise to the Norwegian fjords with Ruth, his latest and really lovely girlfriend. Not that it is a holiday, he is contracted to perform on stage as the resident comic every night. Still, he is never happy unless he is earning money, even on holiday.
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| Jordan Pickford the goalie |
The next 5 days in BP had not too many exciting happenings to write about. I was hiding from the heat mostly, Roy occasionally went out shopping and/or to the pub, so it was routine. I still had lots of paperwork, namely making sure that we had enough money in the bank, as booking.com was drawing the cost of the Debrecen accommodation on the 2nd July for our next caching trip East. I also had to finish the cache list for that trip, as well as prepare for yesterday little jaunt. We also made attempts at watching the World Cup, and while we are not particularly enthusiastic about football, this time it was worth watching some of the matches. England versus Mexico was a real sensation. Even I was celebrating, which does not happen too often.
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| Tadej Pogačar |
Talking of football: I am really cheesed off about 3 major sports events being held at exactly the same time. The World Cup, the Tour de France and Wimbledon. Even though we were trying to stay cool indoors lately, we still didn't have enough time to watch all of them. In my case, Wimbledon went for a Burton, but I am watching the odd match and followed Day 4 of the Tour the France yesterday. Amazing guys those cyclists. And I had some more information about Tadej Pogačar, whom I have heard of, but never appreciated how good he is.
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| Áprily-valley with the cache nearby |
Two more interesting, albeit rather annoying things have also happen last week. The first one was the announcement of the city council about car parking. They have overnight abolished using coins for parking and the parking meters. In fact, they are removing the parking meters and you can only pay by smart phone. What on earth will those people do who have no smart phones, like Roy? Budapest GO is a fantastic bit of software, as I wrote last week, but guess what? Yes, the parking bit of that software is not due to come out for God knows how long. Brrrrr!!!!
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| The steepness of the valley side |
The other thing was an announcement by Yahoo that my e-mail account's storage is full and I will either have to clear some space or pay for the new version with the facility of storage extension. Considering that Yahoo is an ancient system and I have been thinking of abandoning it for gmail, I had to inclination to pay, so I started the process of deleting 46,000 e-mails. You can imagine that it would not do it in one go, so I spent several days with boring deletions, which was not fun. I am happy to report that while it wasn't all 46,000 of them, but I deleted enough to stop the aggressive pop-ups appearing on my screen.
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| No vehicles, please!!! |
And then, yesterday Roy and I went caching again, (to fill another one of those little boxes with zero in it), North of BP on the other side of the river. One had a km walk each way, up a really beautiful little valley in the Visegrád Mountains, the other one was a mile walk in each direction, along a desert in both appearance and heat, to the remnants of a Roman fort along the Danube. Both were fun, although the desert walk was starting to get to me towards the end. I am nursing sore muscles this morning, but I am glad that I did those two. They have been screaming at me on the map for years, so now they are done.
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| Pretty flower en route to the Roman fort |
One other fun thing was Roy turning up with two complete strangers from the pub one day. They were a hilarious couple, Pip and Martin, from Ripley in Yorkshire. We had a jolly good chinwag, until they quickly departed around 7 pm, as they wanted to have dinner and a nap, before waking up at 2 am to watch the England/Mexico match in their hotel room.
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| The big skies en route to the Roman fort |
I think this is it for last week. We are in town until next Monday, which happens to be my birthday. We would have left earlier, but we got a notice of a scheduled power cut on that day, and we like to be around when the power comes back on, just to check if everything is OK in the flat. We plan to leave next Tuesday, so next Wednesday we should be back in the village, preparing for our 4-day trip to the East.
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