Graz; Sunday, 25 February, 2018

Breakfast completed I headed out of the hotel and caught the tram into the centre of the city. I went for a long wander round the old town, taking in the opera house, cathedral and mausoleum and some of the very pretty, small squares and alleys that make up the pretty heart of Graz.

After stopping for lunch in a café near the Hauptplatz I headed over to the Joanneumsviertel – a collection of buildings in the centre of town that now house the city’s art gallery and natural history museums.

I spent a long time looking round the two museums before heading back to the tram stop and taking the tram out to the suburb of Eggenberg where another part of the museum exists at the spectacular Schloß Eggenberg.

The palace is built in a large park and with a thick covering of snow everywhere looked like a scene from a Christmas card. The palace itself was closed for the winter, but it was still possible to explore the ground floor courtyards as well as the grounds – including meeting the very cold looking peacocks that inhabit the park.

Having looked round the park I headed back to the tram stop and caught the tram back to the hotel. I was freshening up and preparing to head back into town for dinner when I got a text message from BA telling me that my flight the following evening had been cancelled and instead I’d been moved onto a flight to Heathrow. With train specific tickets for the journey back to the Vienna the following day, it took a good couple of panicked seconds, and a couple of re-reads, to realise that the Heathrow flight was 10 minutes later than my originally booked Gatwick flight and therefore I didn’t have to worry about changing rail tickets.

Having got my pulse rate back down I finished off freshening up and then head out into town for some dinner and a bit more of a wander round the city at night before heading back to the hotel to pack.