A Mega Time in Prague

 

A Mega Time in Prague

After attending the Brugge Beer Mega Event in April we decided to see what other Mega Events there were  in Europe and spotted the Geocoinfest in Prague.  Some cachers local to us had visited Prague not long after we started caching and we’d always thought it would be a nice place to visit.  So, within days our flights, hotel and car hire were all booked.

In June the Maze Event was published and we couldn’t believe our luck.  This was the first Maze event ever outside of  USA and would be a new cache type for us. Would a CITO be published as well we wondered, thus raising the possibility of 12 different cache types in one day?  A few weeks later the CITO event was published but the start time was 7am and our hotel was quite a distance away.  No problem!  Booked a room at a hotel a short walk from the park and cancelled our original booking - sorted.

Czechs seem to be crazy about Wherigos - and we quite like them too.  There are more Wherigos in the Czech Republic than there are in the UK.  There are only 130 active Wherigos in the UK (11 of which are owned by us. We have another 2 which we've archived) out of a total of over 155,000 caches.  In Czech Republic there are over 211 Wherigos out of fewer than 35,000 caches.

We were planing to arrive on the Tuesday evening.  Spend Wednesday finding caches to the south, spend Thursday in the centre doing the town trail Wherigos and generally sightseeing.  Saturday would be filled with side events and Sunday would be the main Mega and attempting to find 12 types in one day.  That leaves Friday 'spare’…. Not for long!  It just so happened that there was an event in the evening just over the border in Germany just to the left of Dresden.  Hmm…. We also have only found five different cache types in Germany so we identified a Webcam, Letterbox and Multi to bring the total to nine types!  A too good a chance to miss surely…

Love locks

CACHING IN PRAGUE

Back in May, the Groundspeak Blog mentioned two caches in Prague which were the world’s most visited.  So those went on the to-do list. There are four bi-lingual Wherigos starting near the main tourist area so we decided to do those as well although we’d opted to leave the easiest looking one for the Sunday to ensure finding the 12 cache types.

Scooby Doo Wherigos

Wednesday: Headed through the horrendous rush hour traffic in our hire car to an area South East of Prague to find a set of nine Scooby-Doo themed Wherigos which really appealed to us.  We'd been in contact with the CO over the possibility of providing us with English translations and rather helpfully he told us that he would provide English versions in time for the Mega event and luckily they were published just in time.  A pleasant walk around a forest although we were initially un-easy about the number of people wandering around. More cachers?  No; it seems they were gathering wild mushrooms!  Next we headed West to another Wherigo which had a 'play anywhere' puzzle.  There are a few of these in Europe and they are great fun because you can take your time solving it before actually heading out to find the cache.  Basically you go to any open area and the zones are automatically plotted relative to where you are. This particular one was all in Czech and Mark had spent several nights wondering around trying to complete it and translating key instructions then trying again etc.

Ticket machine took some fathoming

Thursday: Left the car at the hotel and headed off to catch a tram. The hotel receptionist advised us that we could use the ticket machine or buy tickets form the post office. Unfortunately the Post Office staff weren’t aware of this! :D

Ta-da! We have the tickets!

 
Finally managed to rustle up enough change to buy a couple of tickets from the bewildering ticket machine.  It’s actually easier than it looks once you understand it and the public transport system is so efficient and cheap to use - a 24hr ticket to hop on and off trains, trams and metro only cost around £3 each.

Lennon Wall

We started off by doing a short Wherigo which follows the river and after having a coffee returned to Charles Bridge to start the longer Tourist Guide I Wherigo which was about 6kms long and seemed to take forever.

We saw an exhibition by the river which was all about the June 2013 flood, we remember watching it on the news and hoping that there wouldn't be too much damage for our visit, but it's very hard to see any signs of the flood now.  This is a rather interesting photo:  On the left shows the statue of Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, partially submerged by the rising flood waters from the Vltava River at 16:40 on 2 June 2013. The statue was completed covered by 19:30. The photo on the right I took and we were able to walk to it easily today.

We picked up a few other caches en route and visited the astronomical tower.  I'd seen a photo in our Rough Guide book that taken from the top of the tower, so we decided to climb to the top to take the same photo .

After having a bite to eat and despite being totally worn out, we even made a start on the second tourist trail Wherigo but had to stop when we got to a park that was closed for the night.

Friday:  Destination Dresden.

We’d read about Terezin in the Rough Guide and decided to make a detour off the motorway to visit the town. The history of the town is shocking. The inhabitants were evicted during the Second World War and the Nazis commandeered the entire town as a transit camp for prisoners en route to numerous concentration camps including Auswitz, Trelenka etc. The numbers of prisoners held there and the conditions they were held in, is beyond comprehension….

We visited the Ghetto Museum and barrack house before finding a couple of caches and heading on our way. There is a series of caches around the outskirts of the town each called by a child’s name. The cache page simply says the date of birth and death of each child. The simplicity of each cache page is disturbing in itself:

Narozena *08. 04. 1939

transport Cv, c. 613 (06.03.1943 Praha; Terezín)

Zahynula +21. 03. 1944 Terezín

Back on the route. After another short detour to find another  'Play Anywhere' Wherigo, we headed back to the motorway.. or so we thought. TomTom had different ideas and directed us down a very windy lane for several miles before finally getting to the motorway. Progress was swift then. Very swift ;) but no matter how fast you drive on the German Autobahn someone will still want to overtake.  The journey involved driving through the Panenská tunnel, the longest tunnel in the Czech Republic at 2058 metres!

Letterbox Hybrid – Nice and easy and Mark had identified one which was located at the given co-ordinates.

Dresden Webcam – parked in a side street and Mark asked a woman who was just going to a nearby house if it was OK to park here. The reply was a bit surprising. She asked if he spoke English as her German wasn’t very good! Yep she was Norwegian :D The webcam had a painfully slow refresh rate and we had to wait for about 20 minutes before being able screen grab the picture

Multi next, we had a short list of three - good job two as the first two were DNFs.  The third one actually had a higher difficulty rating but was a nice quick find.

Event in Freiberg

Event – this was about 20 or so miles out of Dresden and road improvements meant we had to double back a couple of times because Tomtom lead us to dead ends etc.  The event was just a small regular meet for locals but it was very well organised with a couple of marquees , beer tent and barbecue. We chatted to a few of the other cachers for a while before departing for the two-hour drive back to Prague. Well, that was how long we thought it would take but it was along endless winding tree lined country lanes. It would probably have been very picturesque in the daylight but we just wanted to get back to the hotel.  Eventually we saw a sign giving directions to the Dresden-Prague motorway. ‘At Last’ we thought but Tomtom was insisting that we go its route instead.  Having trusted Tomtom’s lies earlier on, we decided to follow the signs to the motorway. After about fifteen miles in the wrong direction we reached the motorway. Progress was better now but the motorway seemed to fade away about 40 miles from Prague and we ended up going through a town. All the signs said Prague so it probably wasn’t our mistake this time; just the way it was!

Saturday: The Side Events

Left the car at the hotel and hopped on a tram to the centre.  No problem with buying tickets this time. The first event was a presentation by some crazy Czechs who made an expedition through south America with a couple of Trabants, a Fiat 126 and  Jawa 250 motorbike. The presentation was all in Czech but we got the gist of it and the photos were amazing.  On the way in we met a Swedish cacher and sat and chatted with him whilst we were waiting for the presentation to start, we swapped interesting stories of our caching trips and it was interesting to speak to someone who embarks on similar crazy trips to us.

Logbook for GC49B1A

Next event was  in the viewing area 93 metres up the TV Tower.

Yep the event is at the top of the Tower!

 While trying to decide which tram(s) to take, a local lass asked if  needed any help and she helpfully advised us to take the underground instead. The stations on the underground look like something from an old film where they imagine what the future will look like.

Like something from Dr Who

Meet the Danes was next. No problem with the location as the turnout was massive!

Meet the Danes Event

The next one was a D1/T5 event.  Just getting there was more than a D1! It took us ages as the location was off the map given to us by the hotel, so after walking a mile or so and hopping on and off a few different trams and underground trains we eventually arrived.   It was really great fun with me doing the belaying and Mark doing the climbing for our team.

We had planned to go to a few more events but decided to finish off the Tourist Guide II Wherigo instead.

This one led us round the West side of the river including going up the funicular railway. Amazingly the tram/underground/bus ticket is also valid on the funicular!

Funicular Railway Station

We also happened upon a mountain bike/BMX competition. The whole area was buzzing with excitement and action. We stopped to watch a few of the crazies going over the jumps but soon decided to press on.

Cito - Cache Type #3

Sunday morning we were up at 5.30 and out before breakfast to attend the 24 hour TB relay Event, followed by  a visit to the GPS Maze (luckily we were nice and early so no queuing)  and the CITO starting at 07:00. We found a puzzle cache and a couple of Trads during the CITO. Five types before breakfast!  Not bad. Now back to the hotel for a well earned breakfast!

Puzzle- Cache type #5

After breakfast we czeched , I mean checked out and walked down  to the Geocoinfest Mega event where we bumped into Monki, Unowho68 and Blue Nora our caching friends from the Midlands.  The Mega event was extremely well organised and we thought the maps were a great idea, where visitors had to stick a pin in the place they had come from.

The ‘logbook’ was the Groundspeak logo make from tile pieces, another great idea.

'Signing' the log book

The Meet the Germans event near by was more ‘join the queue of Germans waiting to sign the logbook’  EarthCache next followed by the Wherigo making it eight types. No problem with the Virtual but DNF on the Multi which meant we had to resort to the back up plan.

Cache Type #10

Time to head North to the Letterbox Hybrid – cache type number ten.  Where we bumped into some more cachers.



Time for the Multi next, in a strangely quiet area of the city in another very well kept park.  We enjoyed a peaceful sit down before heading south to the small town of Zbraslav for the webcam. Cache type number 12! Yay!  MISSION COMPLETE.







Just as we were sitting relaxing after completing the challenge we were surprised (although not too surprised) to see Monki, Unowho67 and Blue Nora arrive, they'd caught the bus from Prague to find the webcam!  Enjoyed a chat before going our separate ways as we were heading back to the airport.  At the airport we bumped into Spooky Luke and friends, some cachers that had visited Geocoinfest for the weekend from Cornwall.  Had a good chat about all things Wherigo and general crazy caching trips before going off for different flights home.

Cache type #12

We had a great time in Prague, it was exhausting though as we were on the go all the time and I did joke saying that it was like being on a Geocaching bootcamp as there was no time for relaxing but we have many fond memories of our trip to such a beautiful city and would recommend a visit to anyone.

New stats summary
1 new country - Czech Republic
1 new cache type - the GPS Maze
Additional 4 cache types found in Germany making a total of 9 types
12 cache types found in Czech Republic
100th Wherigo found
100th Event attended
....I think that's about it...



Right, now where to next?............

Another Crazy Caching Trip

Sweden and Denmark

We have always set ourselves personal geocaching challenges other than just purely number hunting, such as the 366 day calendar, D/T grid, county map, oldest caches in UK, cache types/countries.  We became aware of the Jasmer challenge a few years ago and have been slowly filling in the grid.  The Jasmer challenge is to find at least one cache placed per month since Geocaching started in May 2000.  

We decided at the beginning of this year to make a concerted effort to fill in as many as we could on the grid.  Mark's crazy trip to The Netherlands back in March was to fill in March 2001. 

Plenty of this needed in Sweden

We had 5 months left to fill only 2 of which are possible in Europe.  September 2000 near Copenhagen and August 2000 near Stockholm.   So back in January we booked our flight to Sweden. While looking at what other caches to do in the area we spotted some challenge caches in Copenhagen which required finding a certain number of cache types per country.  The highest being 6 types in 6 countries.  This really appealed to us and we decided that from then on we'd try and find as many different types as possible when visiting other countries and even set our own similar challenges.

We flew from Stansted on Sunday to Malmö in southern Sweden picked up a hire car and drove to our accommodation.

Our hire car

On Monday we drove across the Oresund bridge to Denmark found Kippers in the Jungle, really pleased to finally find this one as we've been looking at this cache for so long now, we even met some German cachers just as we arrived back at the car.  It's always great fun bumping into other cachers when abroad, 'we all speak the common language of Geocaching', this is a quote from a Dutch cacher we met whilst in Belgium a few years ago.

We found 7 other cache types and rounded off the day sight-seeing in Copenhagen before heading back across the bridge (about £40 each way!)  to Sweden.

Kippers in the Jungle

Tuesday we hired some bikes and spent a great day cyclo-caching.........  That's what we'd like to say but in fact it was....... Tried to hire some bikes. We were staying in Lund which is one of the most cyclocentric towns in the country.  Everyone has a bike and every second shop is a bike shop (or so it seems) so you'd think it would be easy to hire bikes. Wrongo! Why would anyone want to hire a bike if they already have one?

The hotel had bikes for hire but someone had already hired them out to. The receptionist told us that there used to be other hire shops but they had all closed down.  The shop just down the road didn't hire bikes nor did another shop we tried. We eventually located another bike shop which was rumoured to hire bikes but it was closed. The very helpful lighting shop owner next down assured us that the shop did hire bikes but they didn't open until 10:00... if we were lucky.  By about 10:30 we were finally ready to set off for a great day cyclo-caching.  The cycle paths and routes are amazing, you can cycle for miles without seeing any cars.

Wednesday.
Checked out of hotel and made our way towards Malmo stopping to do an Earthcache, Letterbox and a Wherigo on the way.  The Wherigo was around an immaculately manicured park which we later discovered to be a horticultural university. Once in Malmo we filled up with Diesel and returned the hire care and explored on foot.

Alnarp Castle

Then it was off to catch the night train to Stockholm.

This seemed a good idea when we booked it because driving to Stockholm and leaving the car there would have incurred a £100 fee. We would also have had to pay for another night's accommodation either in Stockholm or on the way and it would have been a day of solid driving. Taking all that into consideration the night train seemed a good idea :-)

We left Malmo at 22:35 and arrived at Stockholm at 06:00 having had the worst night's sleep in ages. In all fairness, it's the first time we'd been on a night train but we have been on a night ferry and assumed the compartment would be a similar size to the ferry cabin. It was not!

Thursday

Luckily we were able to check into our hotel straight away so without further ado we dumped our bags and headed off to hire some bikes (no time for relaxing).

Stockholm have a City Bike scheme where you can hire bikes for three days for £16. You are given a card which you have to swipe at a machine to access a bike. The bikes are at various locations in the city and you can leave the bike and walk if you want or just swap bikes if it seems too noisy, uncomfortable etc.  There's even an iPhone app so you can see where the nearest bike station is and how many bikes are there! The only proviso is that you have to 'check in' to one of the many locations every three hours. The cache we wanted to do near Stockholm is 'Match Stash' - a cache placed in August 2000 - one of only four in the whole world from that month! TomTom reckoned it would be about 7.5 miles and take about 40 minutes - this was with 'cycle route' selected. Not sure why but it was a lot further and took a lot lot longer! 

Match Stash

We had swapped bikes at the last City Bike stand before heading out of the city and made it back just outside the three hour time limit. Mark got a 'warning' for being late. Three of these warnings and the card is blocked, or so we were told.  It was just over a 20 mile return trip on the 'city' bikes!  I doubt the bikes had ever been taken that far out of the city before and we feel sure they weren't meant for taking into the forest!

Making new friends at the event

It just so happened that there was an Event at 16:00 at Central Station.  Four brave/crazy Swedish cachers were heading off on an eight day backpacking/caching expedition somewhere up North and had arranged the Event so mere mortals could see them off. We had a really pleasant hour or so chatting to lots of  other cachers and making new friends.

Friday

Spent the day exploring Stockholm/sightseeing and caching on the dreaded City Bikes  ;-) before catching  a coach to the airport. When we booked the plane tickets we hadn't really considered where the airport was - it has 'Stockholm'  in the name after all! Stockholm (Skavsta) is 100km from Central Station and the coach takes 80 minutes to get there! Luckily we had found this out earlier in the day when inquiring about coach tickets so we knew to allow plenty of time!

New stats summary

Two new countries visited
August and September 2000 'Jasmers' ticked off

A new 'most northerly' cache at N59° 19.957 (we actually found a Wherigo whose final location was further north than this but the listed co-ords are 0.19 miles south so doesn't count)

Eight cache types found in Denmark

Nine cache types found in Sweden

All in all an amazing, exciting and fun trip.  Although it was exhausting to say the least and we could've done with a bit more time to relax so Donna has said she is definitely organising the next trip

~~~~~~~~~
Mark

A VERY BUSY MAY

Boscastle

A quick note about our blog:

I won't be updating this page regularly now as I've just started a new full-time job and this means I now have no time during the week for blog writing (but more money for caching trips ........ every cloud and all that ) so I'll now only be updating this page when I have the time.  I've really appreciated all the feedback and positive comments and I'm glad some of our trips have been inspiring to some of you.

So here's a summary of what we've been upto over the last couple of weeks:

Bedruthan Steps

Cornwall

We enjoyed a short break in Cornwall.  We haven't visited since 2009 so were really looking forward to our trip.  There have been a lot more caches published since our last trip too so we decided that on one of the days we would tackle as much of the Halo series as possible.  We decided to do the Southern loop and if there was time continue around the Northern loop.  As it happened the walk took us quite a bit longer than we'd first anticipated, mainly due to the fact that on the cache listing it says the complete walk is 21 miles when in reality just the southern loop we made to be 24 miles!  Also we were stopping frequently, thinking we had plenty of time, as there was so much to see en route.  The weather slowed us down too as it was mixed, hot sunshine one minute pouring down the next so waterproofs were going on and off and most of the terrain was quite hard going, a lot of road walking, bumpy bridleways and an awful lot of up-hills and down-hills.  At the end we were really glad to see the car as we were both very tired and our feet were very sore.  We completed the 24 miles in 13 hours.

But on the whole we had a fab time doing the walk, a real challenge but great fun.

Whilst doing the Halo series we walked through the little town of Fowey situated at the mouth of the River Fowey, a beautiful place with narrow streets, I spotted something in a shop window that I wanted to buy for Beth but it would've been impossible to carry it on our walk so we so we decided we'd return the following day to buy it and explore properly.  We got talking to the shop owner, they had come here from Northern Ireland in the early 90s, settled here and bought the shop and never looked back...... sounded idyllic and really got me thinking............

Mevagissey

For the rest of the time we concentrated on finding a few key caches on our to-do list - We found a few wherigos,  I'm not usually a big fan of them but since Mark's had his own Oregon I've started to enjoy them a little more - Out of all the ones we did this was our favourite White River Wherigo in fact out of all the ones we've ever done this is probably the best, it was really well thought out, a great story, humorous and a fantastic location for the walk. 

Pentewan Sands

Wirral

Our main reason for our trip to this area was to complete the Wirral Way caches.  A series of 80 caches plus extras along the Wirral Way, a walk which starts in West Kirby and follows the track bed of part of the former Birkenhead Railway route which closed in 1962, to Hooton.

We parked our car at Hooton Railway (80p for the day) then caught the train to West Kirby, changing at Hamilton Square.

Once at West Kirby you literally cross the road and start walking down the Wirral Way and back to the car.

We were so lucky with the weather, the sun shone all day and for once we didn't need to worry about carrying waterproofs.

Really enjoyed the walk, meeting lots of really friendly people along the way.  It's a really busy route so although all the caches were straightforward finds the tricky bit was waiting for gaps in the muggle traffic so that really slowed us down at times.

Great views to be had all along the route, then after 7 hours of walking we were back at Hooton and the car.  We made the route to be 14 miles altogether.

So for the rest of our stay in the area we did a couple of webcams, some Wherigos, a virtual and a trigpoint.

On our way home we stopped off at Tatton Park as there was a Wherigo we wanted to find in the grounds.  We had a great afternoon there, although we had to pay to park we were able to look around the gardens for free as we're National Trust members.

Then all too soon it was time to head back home after another fun-packed trip.

HUNGARY

Money!!!

Lake Tisza

Back in January, when we were booking our trips for the year, we were contemplating a return trip to Spain and Mark happened across a log by a previous cacher who mentioned Hungarian power-trails.  Intrigued by this comment, we had a look on the Geocaching map and spotted this one around Lake Tisza with 303+ caches.  We like to try and visit new countries whenever we can but had never really thought about visiting Hungary before but we though this would be a pretty good reason to go.  Within days we had flights, hotels and hire car all booked.

Tisza Balneum Thermal Hotel

Jó estét

In March there was a lot of Facebook chatter about May 4th Flash Mobs and as we knew we'd be in Hungary we decided to hold our own.  It can be tricky trying to get light sabres though customs these days so we had to decide on a different theme.   There is a statue of a girl holding a pigeon in the middle of Tiszafüred that Mark had spotted on Google Earth ....... and an idea started forming. Hmm... a flash mob where attendees brought along their own Origami pigeons as these would be easy to transport and construct.  Once published we asked elisoft, a Coventry based Hungarian caching friend to translate the page for us.

Lake Tisza Power Trail

This power trail sounds great:  over 300 caches set on a flat, cycle-able path around Lake Tisza.  Just look at the map! Yeah it’s a long trail but there’s always the option of nipping back across the bridge after #212 if it gets too much.

Our Cachemobile for the week

We flew out to Budapest from Stansted and collected the hire car. A brand new VW Polo with only 17km on the clock.  The drive to Tiszafüred was easy enough although some of the motorway wasn’t shown on TomTom.  We also assumed we would find a supermarket en route to grab a bite to eat. We found plenty of supermarkets but they were all closed! This was a bit puzzling until it eventually dawned on us that May 1st was a Bank Holiday! The hotel staff confirmed this a little later.

The next morning we hired a pair of bikes from the hotel and set off with the intention of finding as many caches as we could in the one day.  The trail started off well and we were making good progress – a find every two minutes.  Before long though, the caches were placed among the trees set back from the cycle path.  So, cycle 523ft..... hop off bike ...... walk down embankment through long grass 150ft...... locate cache (a lot of which were very high up in the trees) scribble on log book.......... traipse back up back to the bikes...... check for ticks!..... and repeat. It wasn’t all like this, some of the caches were placed by marker posts on the track but the majority required this extra 300ft walk.

Oh yeah I was wearing knee length shorts so the first glimpse of a tick understandably put me off walking through the long grass!  As the day warmed up the mosquitoes became more and more of a nuisance as well.  We very quickly realised that we had no hope of completing this in one go so after about 20 miles we decided to call it a day.

We'd made up our minds we wanted to see a bit more of the area during our stay than just the power trail, also find a few other cache types and find time to relax, after all this is supposed to be a holiday right?

So as much fun as it was finding lots of caches around the lake it all got a bit repetitive and we decided to head back to the hotel arriving just in time for another delicious buffet meal which we'd earnt after cycling 40+ miles!

Ecocentre

There are only six Letterbox Hybrid caches in the whole of Hungary and one of them is within Lake Tisza Ecocentre on the West side of the lake, luckily it was already on our list of places to visit so we didn't mind having to pay to access this one.  A really interesting place to visit with lots to see but unfortunately there were no English or German translations so we had no idea what we were looking at, interesting all the same.

We are always keen to find as many different cache types per country so now it was time to find a Multi.  Apart from a couple of nearby Multis on islands (requiring a boat), the next closest  was a  two-stage multi  in a village called Tard about 17 miles away.  If this had been 17 miles on a motorway it would have been no problem at all. Instead it was along some of the worst roads we have ever seen. The potholes are horrendous. All the locals appear to be used to them and just happily whizz along swerving around them; can be quite disconcerting when oncoming traffic appears to be aiming straight at us for no apparent reason.

Letterbox final

Another ‘interesting’ thing was the route TomTom directed us.  It appeared to be through an old military base with derelict buildings and overgrown concrete tracks (yes, this surface WAS actually better than the proper roads!) .  After a mile or two we felt very uncomfortable as we got deeper and deeper into remote countryside and when we ended up on an old runway we decided to turn around and find an alternative route.  Further research after returning home revealed that it was a former Russian reserve airbase.

The Multi in Tard started at a pair of very old cottages way off the beaten track, I won't say tourist track as I don't think it exists in that area.  We were content to just to take a photo from the roadside but an old lady insisted on showing us around and explaining how old the houses were and what it was like living there in the olden days etc, etc... or at least we think that’s what she was saying because we couldn’t actually understand a word!  At one point she dressed Mark up in a traditional outfit and we were beginning to wonder how we could get away or how much it was all going to cost us, I bought a hand-crafted traditional cross stitch bookmark from her and she didn't seem to want any payment so after quite some time we had to make our excuses about having to be somewhere else and we made our getaway.

Final location was in a graveyard.  One thing that was noticeable was that some of the gravestones had birth and death year dates as is usual but they also had the birth year of the living spouse!  Made it seem like they were eager to be able to add the final date.

Hotel Fuzfa

On Saturday, we hired some bikes from a hotel on the other side of the lake to do some more of the Lake Tisza Power Trail. This side was better than Thursday’s but as fate would have it 2000 other people thought it would be a nice day to cycle down that way as well.

Jó estét

Group Photo

We listed our flashmob event in March and had no ‘Will Attends’ until 30th April, we weren't really expecting many attendees due to the remote location but in the end there was one German, two English (us) and 15 Czechs . The event went far better than we could ever have hoped.  Most of the attendees had their Origami pigeons and we all posed next to the Girl with Pigeon statue for a group photo.  This is one of the best things about Geocaching, you can go somewhere 1,000 miles away from home and make friends with strangers instantly even when you can barely speak a common language.  A truly memorable event.

Here's a short, heavily edited video from the event...

In this part of Hungary hardly anyone can speak any English as German is their second language. We had done a bit of preparation by learning a few key Hungarian words and phrases but more often than not we had to speak German to be understood.

We checked out of our hotel Sunday morning straight after breakfast and headed to Budapest where we did a couple of Wherigos, a puzzle and two Virtual caches before heading to McDonalds and the Airport for our flight at 21:30 CET.  
 

Storks nesting on top of electricity poles

That was our 8 icons completed and a new country too.  We didn't spend too long in Budapest as it was very stressful driving in the city as it was so busy with tourists but it was nice to see the sights.

Another very intensive, character building, caching trip.