Fun in a hotel bathtub

Artful plumbing
Las Vegas, NV
November 2018
Photo originally shared on Instagram

I can already predict what my kids will say when I get home: “Our dad went to Las Vegas, and all he did was take stupid pictures of hotel room bathtub fixtures.”

They wouldn’t be wrong. And it wouldn’t be the first time I turned the lens inward while I was away.

That’s largely because when you’re away for work instead of vacation, you don’t have tons of time to explore. I’ve been trying to take quick walks outside, but I’ve been “on” from before dawn until late at night, then back at it early again the next day. So it’s been hard to squeeze in the time to get away.

To compensate, I’ve been looking inward, stealing snippets of the oddball facets of my hotel room, the hallways, the views out the windows, whatever happens to be under my nose at any given moment as I move from my room to the conference venue and back.

It’s the kind of photography we just don’t do when we have the luxury of time. And it means the weird factor gets cranked up a notch or two.

Which largely explains why I found myself exploring my hotel room - including the bathtub - with my smartphone camera before I tucked in for the night. Is it strange? Of course. Trivial? Indeed!

But looking back at the photo, and thinking of how it ended up being created, makes me realize just how lucky I am to be who I am. If a sign of a life well lived is a tub fixture photography fixation, I’m okay with that.