Welcome to the Fold

Many of my friends have told me I should start a blog documenting my myriad nights in hotels ranging in price from $50 to $89 a night before tax. So start a blog I shall. For my first entry, I will detail my survival kit. The things I will not leave home without. Some are obvious to non-travelers, some are not. But I feel it's important that anyone starting a life driving several thousand miles a month and staying in said mid-range hotels at least once a week should know to have. So here it is. The Basic Survival Guide.

• One pair underwear, one undershirt, one pair pants, one shirt, one pair dress socks, one pair casual socks per day. Let's be honest. Most of us don't wear pants only once and wash them, but it's important to err on the side of decency.
• All the normal toiletry stuff. I won't bore you. Anti-perspirant, toothbrush, toothpaste, blah, blah.
• One pair dress shoes. 
• One belt, always to match the aforementioned dress shoes. We are road warriors, we are not barbarians.
• One stack of disposable plastic cups. This is the first item that may not seem obvious to most, but it will go miles in making your hotel stay more comfortable. Hotel room cups suck. They are tiny. They are either individually wrapped, small, plastic pieces of crap, or small glasses that may or may not be clean.
• One work laptop
• One personal laptop
• One work phone
• One personal phone
• One power cord for each of these stupid damn electronics you have to carry.
• Headphones. Mid-range hotels have thin walls and no one wants to listen to their neighbor binge watching Stranger Things.
• Cold medicine. Even if you're not sick, the NSAID in Dayquil is fantastic for the headache that you will invariably get from listening all night to the door slamming assholes or the family sharing one room for their ungrateful, stomping children to use the pool.
• Your CPAP machine. (That's for us fat kids who snore and shit.)
• Your own alarm. Never trust a hotel alarm clock. It's like asking Hitler to remind you when Passover starts.
• The following apps: Yelp, Google Maps, Pokemon GO, Sky Guide, Monster, Realtor, Uber, The Weather Channel, Expedia, Choice Hotels, Best Western, Hilton Honors, Club Carlson, stayconnect, the entire Microsoft Office suite, Docusign, TurboScan, SamCard, OpenTable, and Starbucks.

These are the basics. The things you need to survive. Don't believe me? Spend 80 nights in hotels in the first 8-1/2 months of the year and tell me I'm wrong.