//------------------------------//
// September 12, 1007 
// Story: Hotels of Equestria 
// by NorrisThePony 
//------------------------------//


~ The Wayfarer Inn, Fillydelphia – September 12, 1007 ~


How many of you fine ponies are aware of the concept of a stamp card? 

I imagine most of you are, but I guess for purposes of providing a proper and comprehensive hotel review, I should explain. A stamp card is a sort of loyalty card given to you by a business, in which every purchase you make moves you a little ways further to some reward. Buy thirty coffees at your favourite coffee shop, get the thirty-first free. Get your chariot serviced in the same shop all year, receive a free keychain. 

It's a simple affair, but nonetheless one might be surprised to learn that The Wayfarer Inn, located two blocks away from the Fillydelphia Train Station, offers a stamp card. 

I don't believe I need to point out the odd and somewhat depressing concept of a stamp card at a hotel. 

It was only when the concierge took one look at my card and handed it back to me, motioning with a hoof at the starry sky of stamps and saying with a smile that my room was on the house, did it fully dawn on me just how hopelessly lost I was from any permanent concept of home. 

With my mood upon entering established, I feel prepared to say with earnest that The Wayfarer Inn is a reliable and thoroughly adequate hotel. It is that nice sort of hotel that is so thoroughly average that you hardly even really remember your stay there. Nothing so strikingly unpleasant occurs that may allow you to remember much about the experience, nor does anything particularly exceptional expose itself amongst the stock decor and dime-a-dozen pictures on the wall (seriously, is there just a specific factory devoted to creating these bland abstract paintings that exist only to fill obligatory space on a hotel room wall?) 

These are the sort of hotels that seem to follow a mutually agreed upon blueprint—one that, regardless of corporate standing, a hotel will choose to follow to a T regardless. Two beds, two lamps, a desk, and a window boasting a muddy-looking Fillydelphia rooftop several stories below. The bathroom is stocked with those scentless toiletries and those sandpaper towels, the television boasts the weather channel, the program guide, the local news, and thirty-seven channels of static. Down on the fifth floor, there is a small rectangle filled with unpleasantly-lukewarm-water that is masquerading as a pool, as well as a few decade old exercise apparatuses in a room that claims to be a gym.

These sorts of hotels don't deviate from the norm nor do they specifically intend to. Nor do I specifically expect them to. No pony staying here expects a spa, and as long as there isn't an adolescent hockey-team a floor above them (which, in my honest experience, actually happens rather frequently) somepony simply sleeps, wakes, checks out, and continues on with their lives as though the past 8 hours were unworthy of note—because truthfully they aren't. 

Of course, there almost always exists a sort of underlying transcendental outlier within the concept of hotel reviewing. Mainly, that there are some certain diminutive little variables that, regardless of the state of the hotel itself, can and will completely alter one's stay. 

Perhaps an air conditioner produces a slightly irritating frequency, or perhaps the silhouette of a lamp produces an eerie shadow—I cannot hope to fault the hotel owners for such a minor little problem, and as such I am presented with the odd situation of giving a hotel a favourable review despite the fact that I could not for the life of me get a wink of sleep during my stay. How odd, that I have razed hotels that I have woken up feeling refreshed in. 

Such a transcendental outlier presented itself during my stay in The Wayfarer Inn as the smoke alarm above my bed. 

A blinking red light, in irregularly timed patterns. Sometimes every three seconds, sometimes every ten... I found myself trying to count each blink and failing each time. 

When one is left alone in a hotel room at midnight staring up at a blinking smoke alarm, it is as though they lose any concept of spatial awareness. Their sense of chronic progression also seems to vanish. The hours creep on into infinity, the light blinks, the room contorts in strange ways as the eyes desperately beg one to sleep, the light blinks, one's thoughts begin to venture, the infernal bloody light blinks...

Indeed, my thoughts were venturing as I sat watching the blinking smoke alarm. At first, with irritation at the infernal device—I devised a plan to cover the insipid thing with a pillowcase, but a vivid vision of my charred and burned corpse in a hotel bed quickly convinced me that such a thing was perhaps inadvisable. 

And so I was left in that strange timeless void. In the middle of the night, without anypony around and without any events presenting themselves for completion, one cannot continue occupying their mind in order to hide themselves from the truths they keep buried beneath an assumed life.

In the dead of night, staring at a blinking smoke alarm light, all alone in a hotel room for two, I had great difficulty running from my mind's taunting and truthful remarks—my life was no more than a stream of the same bland hotel room in the same bland cities as I slept away the night to prepare for the same bland task come morning. 

I suppose I ranted. I apologize for that.

Had it not been for the blinking smoke alarm, my stay at the Wayfarer Inn would have been thoroughly adequate. A thoroughly adequate conceirge greeted me with thoroughly adequate manners, gave me the adequate keycard and pointed me down the adequate lobby to the elevator, which took me up several floors to my adequately decorated room, where I promptly plopped down upon my adequately plush bed. 

And sometimes, adequate is all a mare truly needs.

★★★ - Self Published on October 5th, 1007