Grrreat, we thought. We’ll make a nice little weekend outing of it.

Leave Gamma with her grandma to watch more quiz shows while we drive around the country, first to fetch Beta from her ski course, then to drop her in another town for some sort of information weekend about something.

It was the sort of complicated logistical arrangement that overwhelms me, and on which my wife thrives. In constant telephone contact, we arrived at the arranged gas station/rest stop where our daughter waited with her classmates, only to discover it was the wrong gas station/rest stop. Somehow we had to get across the freeway to the other one, which turned out to be easier than it originally looked.

Then we got her, got her stuff, said “bye,” etc etc and headed to the other place. First we went to the bed and breakfast we had booked via this techological miracle known as the Internet. I’m not going to link their website, but when I saw the pictures of the rooms I originally thought, “they could use a graphics program to spruce those up a bit.” I thought, rooms can’t look that bad, you know?

So we got there. Good location. The town was practically a ghost town; you’ll find isolated towns like that throughout Austria that are just dying out. Lots of empty storefronts and For Rent signs; you half expect Pink to come riding in on a black horse and beat everyone up. All the roofs covered in snow, but the weather was warming up and now and then there would be what are called in Austria “roof avalanches” where a massive load of heavy, wet snow and ice would suddenly slide off the roof with a roar and crash down onto the sidewalk.

Do I have a nosebleed? My nose is threatening to bleed. Hay fever, dang. Hazelnut season right now.

Pink. Where was I. Good location, right next to the main town square. We rang the doorbell, and Satan’s ex-wife answered. My first thought: ex-hooker. This is why: slender woman in her forties, perhaps, or younger and just very burnt-out. Long hair dyed black as can be. Cheeks a bit fallen in from the partying life. Tight otherwise non-descript clothes. Very much mascara around the eyeballs. But that is not really why. Why is the look she gave me: it took her less than a second to look me over from head to toe and know what kind of person I was. It was like getting a CAT scan and an MRT at the same time, only faster and without crawling into that noisy tube. Then she turned her attention to my wife and daughter and spent most of the rest of the time talking to them.

The place was a bit run-down. We climbed the stairs to our room.

“Watch the top step, it’s a bit higher than the others,” she said. Right, I thought, and stumbled over it.

The floor going into our room was slanted. It was not level. It was a bit lower at one end than at the other. The room… have you ever walked into a place you ordered on the Internet because your wife told you to be a man and make arrangements this time and just been crestfallen? We were beyond that. We were speechless. The room was freezing cold and dusty. There were skanky prints on the walls of pastel paintings of young women in various states of undress. Nipple here, shapely naked back there. There was a TV. Small, like 6″x6″ but a TV. There was an old uncomfortable-looking bed. She obviously had tweaked the Internet images in a graphics program.

I bet she rents this out by the hour, I thought.

How do you like it? She asked. Everything okay? We were speechless. Neither of us said anything. I looked out the window: someone here was a collector; there were glass cases on the walls of the walk around the courtyard containing stuff. Various stuff. Prizes from kids chocolate surprise eggs. Garage-sale stuff. Crockery. A model sailing ship. Just stuff.

She asked us which breakfast we wanted brought to our room, normal Continental or expanded Continental, and when. Normal Continental, I said. At least the place was cheap. On the other hand you get what you pay for.

Then she gave us our key, gave us a registration form to fill out, which we did as we were in shock and her eyes were also hypnotic due to all the mascara around them. “We have to go get our bags,” we said.

“She looks a bit like an old hooker,” I said. “How would you know?” my wife asked. “Just guessing,” I said. I described her CAT scan/MRT look.

My wife said the placed looked like a bordello. “How would you…” I started, but some things you’re better off not asking if you don’t want to hear the answer sometimes. It was a good location for one, right off the main square, discreet entrance.

We dropped our kid off at her place, which was a 2 minute walk down the street (good location, as I said). She was staying at a youth hostel. Clean place, even had a sauna. We were a bit jealous.

Bye mom, bye, dad, she said. There was a castle in town too. A bit out of town, big castle, rented rooms. But we didn’t even go look at it. It was the pension (B&B gives the wrong impression, I think) or nothing.

The town was really depressing. But there was an Irish pub directly across the street from our pension. “Hey!” I said. I think this was a greater plus in my opinion than in my wife’s, but she’s a really good sport. This trip reminded me of that. We put our bags in our room. I noticed a cupboard with a sign reading “Glasses” on it. Curious, I opened the door. It contained two drinking glasses and nothing else.

I laughed about that for a good five minutes. Then I pointed it out to my wife, and we laughed for another five minutes.

Then we explored the town. It was a nice little medieval town, thick walls, all that medieval charm, not so much at the knights in armor and maidens in castles end of the scale, more at the garbage-and-chamber-pots-flying-out of upper-story windows end of the scale, and public executions and stuff. Black plague and stuff.

It was lunch time. We decided to pass on the seafood restaurant. Seafood in a Central European ghost town somehow failed to get us enthusiastic. The pizzeria, in between a boarded-up shoe store and an empty drug store, had gone broke. We ended up at a rustic restaurant on the town square and it was like stepping into a different world. This town was like that: a town of contrasts. Here Mrs. Satan, there a friendly efficient waitress in a clean, charming restaurant with good food and fast service.

We went shopping after that, bought running stuff we’d needed for a long time, then went out to this place in the woods the sales lady recommended for us to run but just took a walk as there was no place to change and the ground was still partly covered in snow. Then we went back to town and had dinner in the same place.

And so on. Watched TV that night. Eventually the heat came on and we stopped freezing in time to go to sleep. Having a pint in the pub across the street helped too. Very smoky place, very very crowded. Maybe the only pub in town, who knows, although we did see a couple very seedy ones on our walks… scary dark places with gambling.

Yeah. Had lunch at the same place the next day. No, wait, no we didn’t. We thought that would be overdoing it. We drove around looking for somewhere else to eat in a nearby town. The castle looked too ritzy so we didn’t go there. We saw a big sign for one place, got lost looking for it, then when we gave up we found it. It wasn’t bad. Nothing funny happened there except there was a lamp hanging low over our table and my wife bumped her head on it. Then when the waitress came, she bumped her head on it as well. Two times.

Then we got our kid and drove home. Gamma was happy to see us. So were her grandparents. They had been to the circus. Gamma saved us some popcorn.