Imperial Weekend

Last year for her 60th birthday, I surprised my Mum with a voucher for a weekend at Grand Hotel Panhans at the UNESCO-listed Semmering region, popular summer resort back in the days when the Emperor and his entourage escaped the city heat on the newly built railway. This weekend was the latest date we (the catch of the present was that I accompanied her...) could use the voucher and so we arrived at this Titanic of a hotel on Friday afternoon:

Having recently been renovated and (partly) redecorated, it was pretty impressive but to me, it radiated post-communist chic rather than imperial charme. The 80s decor of our room, the corporate design (see the shower gel and soup-case below) and the Hungarian and Czech waiters did little to disperse that impression:

We took the car so we could easily have packed the skis as well, but not expecting so much snow we just packed our hiking boots, much to Mum's regret. The flood-lit night slopes we could see from our window did look pretty inviting, I have to say.

In the absence of skis, we spent the weekend eating, walking a slushy and extremely slippery slope up to Pinkenkogel opposite Hirschenkogel, where the ski lifts are, and testing the hotel's "wellness area" (where you could see Barbapapa-shaped hotel guests wobbling around naked on the way to the sauna - not exactly my kettle of fish) and swimming pool. The latter was in an older part of the hotel which reminded Mum of her boarding school. I also finished Petite Anglaise, the book (more about that later) and had a relaxing massage called exactly that - "relaxing massage".

The snowy path leading to Pinkenkogel

On the way back to Vienna we stopped at Reichenau an der Rax, drove through the aptly named Höllental (devil's valley) and took a short walk in the old part of Wiener Neustadt, from where Mum took the train to KLU. If you ever happen to come to Wiener Neustadt by car and need to find the railway station, don't be as naive as I was and think "railway stations are always easy to find" in a sense of all roads lead to Rome the railway station. Not so in WN, where you drive around in circles after having spied a solitary "Bahnhof" sign and then no more. Directions? So overrated!

After decades of treating me to fancy holidays abroad, Mum found it hard to adapt to this reversal of traditional roles with me picking up the tab for a change. I felt almost grown-up.