This post was inspired by today's 5-minute writing prompt in the Freewriters Community - Don't Look In The Corner
Enjoy !
Image by jirikraus from Pixabay
This is a true story, although I plead guilty to embellishing it slightly, and the passage of time might have played tricks with my memory.
For our honeymoon, my wife and I chose to go to Austria. We like spa holidays, so we stayed just south of Vienna in a town called Baden bei Wien. The spa was based on the hot springs which rose in the town, and ran in steaming streams through culverts, bearing a very strong aroma of sulphur.
The whole holiday was utterly surreal in so many ways. Back then, you booked hotels on a central website for the town. When we got to our hotel, they had no record of the booking. Eventually it turned out we were at the wrong hotel. Where we should have been was at the Hotel Sacher, which had once been the hunting lodge of the Sacher family, famous as the inventors of the famous Sachertorte cake (hence the image I chose, since all the photos of the hotel are copyright !)
The hotel was a slightly strange place. It was a beautiful building, very olde-worlde. But the staff were probably all from the same family (possibly on both sides of the parentage...), and one or two were slightly creepy in a polite kind of way.
There was some confusion over which room we were supposed to be in, because they hadn't had a booking come through either. But when they found out we were on our honeymoon, they really did their best to find us a good room.
"It's clean," the porter said. "You don't need to look in the corner, you won't find a speck of dust in any corner."
Then he opened the door. They'd put us in the tower room. Perfectly circular. No corners to look in. Got to love a smart arse....
You can still see the tower, if you look on Google Streetview - it is the room in the tower with the beautiful balcony.