You can tell a lot about someone by the random things that capture their attention on vacations. Sure, everyone will tell you about the sites they see, the people they meet, and that one day where everything went wrong or everything want right. Nonetheless, most of us have a few quirks in addition.
My quirk is that I always come back with stories about hotel bathrooms. In particular, I'll always have something to say about the hotel towel shelf or the hotel towel rack. It's kind of embarrassing to explain why, but you can probably figure it out for yourself anyway. You see, I spend a lot of time studying the hotel towel rack on vacation. Between my weak stomach, my tendency to party hard on vacations, and the fact that I often get sick when I am traveling, I am in the bathroom quite a bit.
I know every wall mounted rack that has ever been put up in a major hotel from here to Memphis. There was even a period of time when I used to rip out hotel towel racks and take them back home with me. I had a different hotel towel rack in every room until I realized that I was being crazy and neurotic. The fact that one of the hotels charged me for the damage done to the room and then threatened to sue me didn't help either.
Nowadays, I'm content to bore and mildly amuse my friend with an anecdote about the hotel towel rack thrown in between stories of sightseeing and drinking. It is kind of funny, but the hotel towel rack gag that used to annoy everyone I know so much has become the most popular part of my stories. Whenever I come back from vacation and start to talk about it to one of my best friends, he or she will inevitably say “never mind all that, what about the hotel towel rack?”
To be honest, I'm starting to get a little bit sick of it. I don't really care at all about interior decorating. What started as my own quirky joke has come back to haunt me. I'm constantly forced to answer questions about wall mount racks whether I want to or not. I can not just refuse either, because my friends were such good sports about my hotel towel rack stories in the past. I have to find a way to turn the joke back around, or I won't be able to tell vacation stories at all!
