Hotels 1: Fairfax (2/28/2020)

My travel season, or should I say travel year, has started. We usually have a slow January. Mine followed by six local workshops in late January and early February, and this week my travel started with a big bang: a three-day class in Fairfax. This meant three hotel nights and an almost five hour drive back home, last night. Now it is nose to the grindstone and teach my heart out.

Around president’s day my wife and I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. They had a Hopper exhibit. The exhibit dealt with Hopper’s vision of the American hotels, motels and guest houses. 

A photo of me in front of a vignette at the museum depicting a Hopper scene.  This is really the scene that gave me the idea of this series.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibit   Blue girl on black bed.  Not by Hopper, and sorry I did not write down the artist.

This gave me the idea of doing something similar to Hopper; take pictures in and of my motel room and maybe even describing the stay there. No, I do not want to make it a review. I have already done this at times when I wrote about the sounds next door while trying to go to sleep, and my fantasies about what happened in my room before I occupied it. If you search for the word travel in my blog, you find some other references, but these two are the clearest ones about motel room stays.

So this past visit to Fairfax was the first, and the Hilton Garden Inn where I stayed must have suspected something, because they rolled out the welcome mat for me. Something I do not deserve; I am only a minor member of their loyalty program. But the fridge was stocked with free goodies (darn, no beer) and there were plenty of fruit and candy bars for me to enjoy. Since I try to watch that elusive girlish figure of mine I did not touch it, although I did have an energy bar for breakfast one morning.

On my way up I had stopped by IKEA and in a weak moment I had bought one of their cheap bonsai trees ($14.94): a ginseng ficus. I brought the tree up to my room as my “emotional support plant.” I still wonder what the cleaning ladies thought of a customer who brought his own plant to his room, but I assume that they have seen stranger items in a room. I’ll refrain from speculating here.

Well, here I’ll post my first Hopper like picture. I already posted it on Instagram, but still for those of you who do not follow me there. Enjoy.

My version of a Hopper like view of my Hilton Garden Inn Hotel room in Fairfax.