When you’re a Hotel Dad, you’re not getting your exercises unless you’re judicious. You gotta work for it, baby. The Peleton (Ugh) is out of reach. The hard wood floors make rolling around on the floor a bit harder. And the baby you’re watching doesn’t allow for much running down to the gym to get the sweat in.
So you walk.
You leave your hotel suite in downtown Burbank and go around the block to start. It’s pretty quiet on this Wednesday morning. You go around the building and end up at the front of the hotel where you have a momentary anxious pause in front of the loading dock where you left the car. For 4.5 hours the night before. But it’s fine!
You take the tree lined path and feel bad for yourself. An old, but intense woman stops right in front of you and says ‘good morning’ in a way that demands you respond, the old lady equivalent of an old guy telling a woman to smile.
This is a low moment, because you have no plan and it isn’t easy to hang out in a baby in the several block radius you are in. He’s too small for playgrounds, and while there is plenty of seating, there’s not too much shade, unless you want to sit and eat, which you aren’t ready to do.
So you walk.
Downtown Burbank isn’t bad, actually. Lots of restaurants and weird little paths. It’s a bit like a public square in Europe, but utterly American cuz there’s lots of cars (and weirdos). But it’s relatively quiet here today, which is nice, cuz you don’t want to be around people.
The anxiety you’re feeling may be about how many times you are gonna end up walking this route, which is sort of familiar. It isn’t far away from the one you walk everyday with the baby from your own home, which is less than a mile away.
You have lunch plans at 12pm, and it’s like 1030am. The baby has just woken up from nap one before you left. You had hoped he would stay awake for a while after his nap, but he’s asleep now. This isn’t ideal, as you had hoped he would fall asleep 15 minutes before you sat down to lunch.
This is one of those moments where you realize you don’t have control over much in life in a traditional sense. You can’t stop your house from getting all fucked up (especially if you don’t own it), you can’t control whether your AirBnb has power, and you definitely can’t control when your baby is gonna nap. It’s out of your hands.
So you walk.