Tirrilstrip12
 Days 144 & 145 Day 144 Ahhhh! Doesn’t it feel good when you’ve got back from a long walk and you can sit back, put your feet up and have a cup of tea? (The down side being that our tea bag stocks are getting to a worryingly low level – no more reserves in our secret stash on the roof – just a box of iffy-looking bags of Coop own-brand “English Breakfast Tea” that we spotted lurking at the back of the supermarket shelf back in Croatia that we’ll have to open soon. The hot weather has accelerated our tea consumption no end and completely scuppered my calculations of usage for the trip). But what a nice walk. 8 out 10 for the waymarking here – but still a few infuriating lapses at critical path junctions. Being wise to this now though, we have got some very good maps of the area and these saw us through with no hitches. An enormous amount of beech woods here – really nice to walk through with dappled sunlight and little undergrowth so visibility through the trees was good. Spotted quite a few nuthatches and a really good view (flew right overhead) of a goshawk(?) as it lazily and effortlessly flew between the trees completely ignoring us. Took us nearly 6 hours of fairly easy-going walking to get back, but at least Tirril has the good grace to be lying flat out alongside us now we’re back. At least it hasn’t been so hot today – I doubt it’s reached 30 degrees today and Philippa has had to root out her fleece to wear this evening. We’ll head to the Bukk Hills tomorrow before making our way to Slovakia at the weekend. Day 145 The guidebook reckoned that Eger was a jewel of a town, and as it was on our route to the next campsite, so we thought a stop was in order. Well – we thought “jewel” was rather over-egging it. Yes, there were some nice buildings and pedestrianised areas as well as, of course, several impressive churches. Still, we had a pleasant walk around. Went up the most claustrophobic of the towers we’ve climbed so far. Not that high (97 steps), but up a really narrow, steep stone spiral staircase inside an old minaret – apparently the only remains of a Turkish mosque built around 600 years ago. So back to the van for lunch. We’d parked near the town’s thermal baths. There seem to be loads of these in Hungary – very good for curing various ailments – or so the tourist literature says. Although, to be fair, all the ones we’ve seen seem to be well patronised. Just a shame about the “odiferous nature” of them (as our guide book, this time rather more accurately, puts it). Fortunately the pong wasn’t strong enough to put us off our lunch. Pushed on to our next site at Szarvasto which is small, but very attractively laid out and maintained. Went for a shortish walk up to a hilltop where someone has had the novel idea of building a viewing tower around a mobile phone mast. Unfortunately the walk back went through the village, so I’ve now got a headache: it seems the Hungarians are big on dogs – but they all keep them outside, in well-fenced gardens. But it means when you walk down the street, each dog comes charging out barking it’s head off until you are well past it’s territory – by which time the next one is out, and so on. So by the time you’ve reached the end of the street (and this was quite a long one), your head is reverberating with the sound of barking dog. Anyway – time to relax a bit until tea time when we’re eating out again at the campsite restaurant. Well come on - £8.00 for a 3 course meal including a glass of wine – you’d be silly not to. And we’ve no TV signal here, so there’s no water polo for us to stay in to watch tonight.
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