I take a lot of pictures on vacation. Some of my favorite subjects to photograph are hotel rooms because there is a little bit of magic in that moment when you first walk into your new temporary home. A fresh, clean, uncluttered hotel room represents the start of a new adventure but on a recent trip to Las Vegas I decided to start my photo session before I entered the room – just in case…

Being from the west coast I’ve done my share of trips to Las Vegas and I’ve even been there for a few bachelor parties. There’s a reason that people have bachelor parties in Sin City and that reason mostly has to do with the fact that public intoxication is the norm by 11pm.  In the real world being somewhat drunk makes you stand out from the crowd. In Vegas you just blend in.

On one of my previous stag parties we had lost one member of our party over the course of an evening. When you’re young and hopping through clubs and bars this isn’t unusual, but when we woke up in the morning still missing our friend we weren’t sure if we should be concerned for him or happy for him. A quick phone call solved the mystery. In the blur of the night before he managed to find his way back to the hotel at around 4 in the morning but he could not remember our room number and had to rent another room for the night.

I accept that it’s possible this was simply an excuse to try hiding the walk of shame, but honestly with a room full of 20-something guys in Vegas the shame would have been pretty minimal. It might have also been expressed by some high fives.

Not being the walk of shame type, I decided that from that moment on I would always take a picture of my hotel room door just in case.  There are no guarantees that I wouldn’t lose my phone out in the wild but I figured having the picture there couldn’t hurt. In hindsight it’s probably just as practical to make sure that every member of the party has their name listed for the room. There’s your travel tip for the week.

The trip in these pictures happens to also be the trip where I managed to miss my flight home, but it had nothing to do with drunkeness or shame. Just regular travel stupidity [averagetraveller.com].

This post was shared with Travel Photo Friday hosted by Budget Traveler’s Sandbox. It probably won’t be shared with RWeThereYetMom or Delicious Baby 😉