Welcome! Gil

A few years ago I toured the United States with a band* as their sound engineer. We started in Seattle, and the first night we were in a really nice hotel, so nice that I took a photo with my Samsung S5, looking into my room from the entrance. I decided I'd take a photo of every hotel room I stayed in on the tour. From that angle.

The next day we drove over a snowy pass and emerged in a small, fully fogged up town called Yakima. The hotel was not as nice as the night before. There was a wifi network in the hotel environs with the password 'BestDrugsRoom12'. At breakfast, a hooker sidled into the dining room for a furtive coffee and to tuck some toast into her handbag, before being bundled out the door by the manager.

I was sharing with Bec, one of the performers, and we were both feeling jet-lagged and disoriented as we had come from a blazing hot New Zealand summer to snow and a dirty fog that didn't lift for three days. Bec arranged a banana and two plums into "meat 'n' two veg" in the fruit bowl in our room and we laughed hysterically for a long time over this,

At night I jammed a chair under the door handle because there was a drunk in the carpark who kept asking me what my name was every time I went out. As it happened, that was one of only two really weird places we stayed on this tour – the other was in Florida. The Florida motor lodge had a swimming pool that had been filled in with gravel and deck chairs placed upon it, a ‘Trump for President’ sign, and the rooms had an uneasy bouquet of possible unsolved murders. There was another sign that said 'maids wanted, apply within'. That night I shared with Dee and we jammed a chair under the door and stayed up talking for ages.

-Gillian Eva Boyd

*The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.