The "Hotel Desk Picture"

In the past three years I've had the fortunate luck to be able to travel.  Admittedly within the US and on a shoe-string budget, but still, travel none-the-less.

As you travel you start to notice some common recurring themes or "traits" during your travels.

Like how you constantly end up with a Kia Rio rental because you're cheap.

How your diet goes to shit because you're travelling out west and out west there are no people and therefore no decent restauarants and therefore your diet consists of gas station food.

Or how you strategically plan your travels around Wal-Mart because your plans change and you need new gear to meet your changing plans.

However, out of all of these "eccentricities" of American Bachelor Travel (TM) there is one that keeps popping up in my travels that I've decided to document henceforth.

The "Hotel Desk Picture."

The Hotel Desk Picture is a recurring visual I see every time I travel.  It is an empirical testament to what happen during the trip which tells a story unique to that particular travel.  It first started when I was in Grand Junction, Colorado about a month ago.  There, without me knowing it, was the perfect set up for the "Hotel Desk Picture."  I had driven from Minneapolis to the western reaches of Colorado.  I was at a shady hotel, but the ideal hotel.  This resulted in me putting my loaded pistol on the bedside table, but not without me first putting my laptop on the lonely beige desk in front of the window.  The combination made me feel like Hunter Thompson wherein I could write all I wanted on my laptop (whilst looking into the multi-colored cliffs of the Rocky foothills), and reach for my gun in the statistically improbable case a leftist sent a hitman after me in these western remote regions a la "No Country for Old Men."

I didn't write anything like Mr. Thompson, and no leftist goon made an attempt on my life.  But after that I have henceforth decided to take a photograph of the desk or bedside table during my travels to document what I (personally) think is a pretty cool phenomenon.

.For example, this is my latest "Hotel Desk Picture"

The picture tells a thousand words, but let me cut them down a bit.

1.  The Jim Beam is there because I had driven a motorcycle through weather conditions that consisted of consistent Seattle-like rain, sheer winds of over 40 MPH (to the point I'd have to draft off of semi-trucks), and 30-degrees-below-average temperatures of 55 degrees.  I wasn't drinking, until god decided to be a total dick and screw me over on my ride to the Bakken.  Thankfully the Devil made Jim Beam and my nerves were calmed upon reaching my hotel.

2.  Speaking of weather, did I mention it rained like Seattle?  Not hard, not soft, but a constant piss of rain that made you think god had drank gallons of water, put a sprinkler spout on his unit and said, "Hey!   Let me piss consistently all over I-94 in North Dakota for 6 hours straight!"  So consistent was the rain that it soaked through my jacket, the liner, and the pocket that my 9MM got wet.  So I had to clean it.  Which leads us to...

3.  "Remington's Cleaner."  That yellow and green can?  Yep, that's gun cleaner freshly bought from the Dickinson Wal-Mart.  And let me tell you what a fine and upstanding clientele that Dickinson Wal-Mart has.

If you ever think it's just minorities outbreeding their capacity to pay for said parasites children, in addition to Casper Wyoming's two Wal-Marts, now add Dickinson for pure, 100%, USDA Grade A white trash sucking off the government dime.  Idiocracy was not a work of fiction, it was a documentary about Dickinson's Wal-Mart.

Anyway, I had to get gun cleaner to clean my gun.  Disassembled it, sprayed it, cleaned it, scrubbed it, and reassembled it to its current state in that picture.

4.  The gloves?  Those are just drying there on the table.  Behind the scene my clothes were all scattered about to maximize the surface exposure to air so they'd dry and I'd have dry undies the next day.  Truthfully the gloves are the first to dry because they're immediately exposed to windsheer while driving.  But still, the larger point is all of my clothes were soaked.  I was standing in nothing but a towel when taking the picture.

The moral of this post is that you should take the time to look at your surroundings while you're on an adventure as it will tell a more telling story than perhaps the adventure itself.  I have my pictures from Grand Junction somewhere, but until that time, I suggest the next time you're out traveling,

stop
take the time to pull out the camera

and take a picture of what is sitting on your hotel desk.

It may prove a better story than the trip itself.