Weekend at Roberts + orienteering + geocaching + the little monster

We left on Thursday after lunch, picked up a cache in Gödöllõ and shopped in Auchan. We were very glad to discover that Auchan had real Greek feta, which seems to have disappeared from every other shop in the last few months. The flat was very stuffy but after a few hours of every window and door open it smelled all nice and fresh again.

Friday we decided to pootle down to Robert's slowly, picking up some more caches en route. The first one was in Gorsium, which is an amazing place. It was first a military camp, then a place of emperor worship, finally just a settlement and it even had medieaval churches after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately the money had run out for further excavating and the fabric is suffering from neglect, but it was still imposing in its scale.

The next two caches were quite nearby, the first being an imposing old tower, which originally was built in the XIIIth century for collecting taxes on the river, later fortified against enemies and finally used as a grain store. In the same village there was a lovely little lake and park where a romantic little bridge created such a beautiful vista. We had our sandwiches at Gorsium and after the other two we journeyed on. The next three caches were all around the Balaton, the first of which was quite difficult to find, but it was worth the bother.

Even Roy got totally enchanted by the environment and history of the lovely old ruined church with plenty of evidence of the past in its walls. The cache was in a big hole up in a tree and the description was so good, we found it straight away. The GPS doesn't always work accurately, not to mention those silly twerps who give incorrect co-ordinates just to make it more difficult. That is one aspect of geocaching I do not enjoy.

The next cache was by an old water mill and the last one in a fascinating old cemetery with weird looking heart shaped graves. I have seen these before, but they are so unique that I enjoyed looking at them again.

Finally we arrived at the place where I had to register for the orienteering, which actually I couldn't do because they wouldn't let me do it just for myself and I refused to pay for everybody in my club. As it happened, it was all sorted later, so there was no further hassle. We managed to pick up one more cache in the vicinity of the orienteering, so that made the total haul for the weekend at 8 caches, which isn't bad. We are planning to pick up two more en route home on Tuesday, so that should make 10, which I will be very happy with. We arrived at Robert's bang on 7pm, as agreed, after a delightful fish supper in a lovely rustic restaurant close to the lake shore. Robert and Volker were very hospitable, as usual, and we chatted well into the night putting away copious quantities of wine and palinka.

The orienteering on Saturday was less successful than usual. As you can see from the map I made no mistakes and went fairly straight to most controls or only a bit round. The trouble was that I am still seriously suffering from a variety of allergies which make it difficult to breathe when I am running (or trying to run) fast. So, no mistakes, just a lack of speed that made me miss the podium, coming 4th out of 12. Not bad, but could have been better. On the other hand, not having to hang around for the medal ceremony has its compensations, in that we managed to get to the same lovely restaurant as the night before in good time. This time I put away some lovely bread crumbed mushrooms stuffed with ewe's cheese, yum, yum!! On Sunday morning we got up, had breakfast and departed in time to get home for the Grand Prix. I never thought that the boring old style Monza circuit can produce as many excitements as it did today. Lewis won and there were a few very eventful break downs and overtaking moves. Finally, I even managed a little chat with Callum after the Grand Prix, although his majesty did not honour me with a good bye at the end. He was busy making a birthday card for Michael, one of his friends who lives on the estate. Obviously, his Sunday afternoon was then spent at Michael's birthday party.

Lazy week at home

Today I managed to have a good chat with Callum. He was in a good mood, recognised me on Skype and waved both hello and good bye at the end. That is about as much as I can expect in terms of conversation, but otherwise he was in a good mood. The ukulele was a birthday present, so was the cow but due to the idiotic new system of taking snapshots on Skype I couldn't catch him in the cutest pose looking this way, rather than towards the TV. Still, he looks lovely and I was so pleased to see him as I have not had the chance to talk to him for weeks now.

This week, since we scarpered from the orienteering last Sunday was spent with mostly agricultural pursuits, but included some computer stuff (family history for Roy and transcription for me) as well as a certain amount of TV watching. It was not very eventful, that's for sure. Unfortunately, my strained or trapped muscle in my shoulder blade was improving very slowly, so we decided to give O a miss this weekend as well. Next weekend is a very important event, so I was resting it to get totally better. This tomato in the picture was one of many we harvested this week from the plant that Roy grew from seed. We received a lot of other tomatoes from a friend at the event last weekend, so combined them with peppers and made some more lecso. Some of our apples got ripe so we ate a few of those as well. The cefre barrels have been filled, in fact we have ended up with a surplus. Juci, my cleaner came up with about a half barrelful of plums, so no more scrounging around for plums! Hooraay!! Now we will need to stretch our food until Thursday or Friday, as we don't feel like shopping until then.

The House at Poo(h) Corner

Lovers of Winnie the Pooh would know about the relevance of the title. Or would they? I am sorry to have to say that this particular corner was called this more due to the 'h'-less variety of the said word than with an 'h'. But let's start at the beginning! We went East last weekend to do some O. It was supposed to be three short sprint courses (one on Saturday afternoon and two on Sunday) in preparation for the Short Distance Championship in two weeks' time. The trouble was, however, that my courses are usually quite short anyway, so they are fairly difficult to shorten much further, so I ended up with three almost full length courses to be done within just over 24 hours. Saturday's event was near Recsk, the site of an infamous Stalinist labour camp. The forest was rough with a fair amount of climb and the temperature was in the high 30's Celsius. Imagine trying to run in that! I nearly died, I couldn't run at all and towards the end I could hardly walk, as it was uphill all the way. I enjoyed the course, it was very good, just could not cope with the heat. Needless to say I came 4th out 4, although another excuse might be that I was the only one over 60, with the other 3 considerably younger than myself.

Afterwards we motored to the town where Sunday's events were held, did some shopping and found our accommodation in the centre of the town. It was in a lovely old 18th century building which is used for high school students in term time. We had to share an 8 person dorm with 4 other orienteers, which would have been OK, but one of them kept shutting the door for reasons of either noise or light and both of us were just suffocating in the stuffy, hot and sticky room. With the door open there was a little breeze, but with it shut we were just wallowing in our own perspiration, which is not my idea of fun. In the evening we went and did some geocaching (again) and had dinner in Old Jack's Pub, which we knew from before. The following morning I managed to strain some muscles in my back, so it didn't look like a very happy weekend all round. And now back to the reference of The House at Poo(h) corner. The finish area was on a sportground with ZERO shade. Roy went on strike and found himself a nice shady corner a 100 yards outside the ground. Which would have been fine, except it turned out to be a much favoured dog toilet, with appropriate little deposits and the accompanying smell. Thankfully Roy's nose is non functional, but mine works just fine. I couldn't really join him after my run for longer than a few minutes, I'm afraid.

After this town run I wasn't feeling too good. We had some more caches to collect and had to do some food shopping too, so I accepted the sad truth with some resignation and gave up the third run. With my back hurting and the promised cold front nowhere near, I really didn't feel like doing any more running. The town of Eger is quite impressive, it has a Bishop and the corresponding Cathedral, it has a famous Castle and a few really beautiful churches. It also has thermal waters, which we didn't have time to visit this time, but got near to doing the gaocaching. The total for the weekend was 4 caches, with a real find of a beautiful Orthodox Catholic Church which is the biggest and most beautiful of its kind in the country.

The iconostasis, which is basically in the place of where the altar usually is in other churches was superb. Lots of hand painted icons set in wooden, hand carved frames, taking up the entire space between the floor, walls and the ceiling. The state of the church is not too good as they can't afford to renovate it at present, and what little money they do have is spent on restoring the icons, rather than the walls and the fabric of the church.

Just in case anybody is wondering what the minaret is doing amongst the pictures: it was one part of a multicache and its origins go back to the 16th century when the town fell to the Turks who then stayed for 150 years. One of the most favourite books I have ever read was "The Stars of Eger", which was set in the 16th century and told the story of how a small band of heroes defended the Castle from the Turks. It didn't fall at that time, only a few years later. Finally, we went to Tesco's en route home and arrived back around 5pm, when theoretically I should have still been pounding the tarmac of Eger, but I wasn't!! :-) Finally, the much promised cold front did arrive, in the form of a drop in temperature of 10 degrees Celsius in a couple of hours. No wonder the Ambulance Service was rather busy this weekend, but at least we have had a really good night's sleep last night - the first one for weeks.

A very hot and busy day

You may be wondering what this lovely old man has to do with our day today. Well, this is a slightly convoluted story: you may recall that I posted the picture of an outside table and benches with a cute little roof over it that we bought on a whim last Tuesday. Well, it got delivered today, which was a saga in itself. They brought it fully assembled and it was so heavy that they couldn't lift it over the narrow steps into the back. The only solution was to drive round the back with the truck, except that the back lane has got very rutted and narrow in the last few years and the truck would not fit. However, this morning Roy spotted - while visiting a neighbour's garden for picking up fallen pears - that it would be possible to drive through their garden and gain the better part of the back lane that way. That is exactly what we did and the guys managed to get round, deliver the furniture and were just about to drive off when they got stuck through our back gate. They came in through there fine, but on the way out the dip just outside the gate got them stuck fast. They tried everything, but to no avail. Until Roy went off and came back with all sorts of gadgets, including an ancient jack he inherited from his Dad. Hence Dad's picture above and the old jack below - and would you believe it? That 80 year old jack got the truck out of the rut and on its way. We then sat down on our latest aquisition, opened a couple of beers and reminisced about Dad, who was a lovely old guy and whom we both loved dearly.

The platform which used to have the swing on it before proved perfect for the table and chairs. Roy decided that we are going to cover the existing rush mat roofing with our old beaver tailed pottery rooftiles, left over from the pigsty and the old stables and sheds. This way it can stay safely outside in the winter and will not suffer from water penetration. Sitting there we felt really comfortable, it is an extremely well spent £400 (incl. delivery)and it is not as if we have been spending wildly lately. Quite the opposite, no major purchases have been made for at least 3 years in the Grant household.

The day was rounded off with harvesting 5 trees' worth of tiny yellow plums for the cefre, which was OK, if somewhat hot in the slowly fading light. The heatwave is back with a vengeance and tomorrow I intend to stay strictly indoors.

Hungária Kupa Day 5

Chasing start on a town sprint - interesting concept! Although they didn't call it a town sprint, rather a shortened distance classic. That it may have been for the longer courses, but my 1.9km decidedly felt like a town sprint. I made no special effort to kill myself in the by now 38 degrees Celsius, so Ágika beat me by about 3 minutes on the last day, but even with this, I was in by the time she started. Roy found himself a nice shady place next to a control about 350 yards from the Finish, right opposite a nice little buffet with ice cream, beer, pizza and chips. He was having a good time too. After the final results ceremony, during which I received a nice pottery medal and a large bottle of Tokaji Aszu for winning W60 overall, we packed up and drove home via Tesco and were in by 7.15pm.

This morning I had another call from Elian and watched him gurgle, smile and put away a large bottle full of milk. He is nearly 2 months old now and getting cuter by the minute. Now we are into catching up with work: first we had to harvest our grapes and they are now fermenting nicely in the fourth cefre barrel. The computer needs attention, in spite of having WiFi where we stayed, I didn't really have the time to spend ages to answer e-mails etc. I have already done a load of washing and plenty more stuff still needs doing.

Hungária Kupa Day 4

Well, I obviously collected up all my mistakes for this day. Control 1 was a children's control and I was in a foul mood already, thinking that if the whole course was going to be like this I would have to have a big row with the planner after my run. Thankfully, the technical quality of the course improved, but I didn't. The long promised heatwave had arrived and my brain never works too well in high heat. Instead of going nicely round the paths to no. 2, I decided to go straight. A few metres into the forest I managed to trip myself up (don't ask for details!!) and landed like a felled piece of timber. The swelling on my right shin was the size of Mount Everest and I also lost my lucky cap, which I had for 8 years. Later I didn't have the energy in all that heat with a large bump on my shin to go back and look for it, but it is fairly certain that I lost it when I fell. Needless to say that I completely lost the plot and made a large detour to no. 2. After this I made a few more mistakes and was convinced that Ágika made up most of my advantage, when it turned out that she made an even bigger mistake on one of the later controls and I beat her again, this time by about 5 minutes. The gap between us was now up to about 21 minutes. No panic for the chasing start on Day 5 then, I thought!

In the afternoon we went to the Museum of the Hungarian Language, which was absolutely fascinating, followed by three caches, one of which was on top of a fair size mountain, accessible by either a long steady climb or a short but horrendously steep one. Have a guess which one I chose? I managed to climb up in 25 minutes, which surprised me a great deal. Mostly for 2 reasons: 1. the large bump on my shin; 2. a still quite bad back coupled with a less than optimum physical state. Well, you never know, do you? The cache was in the neighbourhood of a disused quarry where for centuries they quarried mill stones. It is apparently rhyolite, which is vulcanic in origin and looks terribly like mill stone grit in the North of England. The lake at the bottom of it is rain water, which cannot drain and it was a dramatic scene, where I wished I could have stayed for longer. We had to go for the presentation again for 7pm, followed by another nice meal at the same restaurant Roy liked the night before.

Hungária Kupa Day 3

Day 3 and 4 were based on an old chateau (again), but this one had the size of a palace. Not too bad condition, as it was used as a sanatorium for many years, but neglected nowadays. The park round it gave the terrain for this day and the mountain above it for Day 4. Ágika made a mistake again and I had a good run, so my buffer now increased to about 16 minutes overall.

I picked up a cache in the park itself and in the afternoon went to a Schwäbian Party with wine, food, dancing, brass band and a hillside full of cellars. As the presentations were in the nearby town at 7pm we missed some of the festivities, but what we saw was quite interesting. As we couldn't wait until the cellars opened up, en route there we popped into one in another village and bought a fantastic bottle of Tokaji Aszu direct from the vintner. It cost less than half of what it would have been in the shops and I bet it will taste better. At least judging by the bit that I tasted!

In the evening, after the presentation of a yellow jersey for winning, we discovered a really lovely restaurant where Roy could finally fill his belly with cooked food. He is not a happy chappie eating cold for any length of time!