(Mind the misspellings please.)
For the last several years she made a point of not staying in chain hotels. If she’d needed to live out of a small suite for a few weeks at a time she did not want to be able to predict the furniture and arrangement with more than sixty percent accuracy. In her early days of traveling she’d discovered most chains had the same handful of paintings and pictures in their rooms. Pastorals without location were mixed in with photographs of local landmarks taken from off angles. This happened from Seattle to Tampa.
Most of them were held in frames that hadn’t been replaced in decades. In a way she respected their resiliency. Hotels typically remodeled or rebranded every five to ten years but these frames persisted through each iteration. In a way, the hotel bent the frames’ will.
She’d come to recognize the patterns of local hotels. Without prompting, the staff would tell you about which celebrity who’d stayed there once, tipped everyone extravagantly, and then refused to stay anywhere else when they were in town. Young Celebrity Not To Be Named #1 was a jerk but Young Celebrity Nuber #2 was a sweetheart who also tended to ignore knocks on the door, usually didn’t bother to set the lock or generally wear clothes.