Unexpected Hotel Triggers: Laundry!?

In mid-March I was in Orlando with my parents. We somehow got a hotel room on the seventeenth floor which was lodged between the elevator and the laundry room on either side of a hallway of this weirdly laid out hotel. I thought nothing of this, although my dad had things to say about the elevator and the hum of the fridge—I have noise canceling earphones which must have blocked these things out along with my parents snoring.

Hotel laundry

I’ve never done laundry in a hotel, though my aunt once had to throw something in, and threw a hoodie I’d spilled on in along with it. I can’t recall, but I feel like I had to end up bagging this hoodie anyways because of the fragrance of the available laundry soap. I’ll be traveling for sixteen days in early May, and had my mom and Kat (whose home I will be visiting mid-trip!) not suggested my ability to do laundry on the road, I’d have not considered it.

So, it turns out people do actually do laundry in hotels.

I discovered this the “hard way” in Orlando, with our room nestled right next to the laundry, and clearly, vents interconnected, when one night, the smell of Tide or some similar laundry soap floated in over my bed as I returned from brushing my teeth.

You know those situations that even your best-planned travel and best of packing and pre-travel prep intentions can’t even prepare you for? Kind of like that time my hotel room had aromatherapy in it? This was one of them.
Who on earth would think I’d have to deal with the trigger of other people’s laundry soap in my hotel room?!

Coping with the unexpected

Well, there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point near midnight. What would the solution be—calling the front desk and requesting a midnight room change? Drama much? No thanks. Instead, I made sure my inhaler was beside my bed, and set my alarm to take my ADHD meds in the morning a couple hours before we headed out to Disney World, knowing if I woke up with a headache from the laundry smell, that the pain meds, too, would have a chance to kick in before we headed to the park. I’d already been needing morning nebulizer breathing treatments my first few days in Orlando, so it wouldn’t be anything new to multitask another morning neb treatment if I woke up feeling tighter than usual, or tighter than I had been, in the morning.

Fortunately, while my lungs were morning-/hotel-humidity-grumpy the next morning, I didn’t have a headache or seem too much worse for wear in the morning!

But who’d have thought that the laundry room, from my own hotel room, would’ve been one of those unexpected hotel triggers?!