Hot Tub Love Affair

Along with my favorite dSLR, I also brought a "fun" camera along with me on the trip -- the Fuji Instax. With the death of Polaroid, it's the last mass market instant camera you can buy in the US. It's sort of big and bulky, and there's some sort of weird pent up demand for instant film -- if you bring this thing out, people will invariably ask you about it.

Dozens of people asked us about the Instax on our trip. To Betsy's awakening horror, she realized that I implicitly viewed each and every one of these people as an opportunity to essentially recite the Wikipedia article on the Instax.

Inside me beats the heart of a docent.

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That brings me to another thing dear to my heart -- hot tubs. My first encounter with a hot tub was on a trip I went on with my parents into the mountains of northeastern Alabama and southern Tennessee. I was an easy kid to bring on a road trip: as long as I had a book to read, I was very happy.

Except, my parents decided to have us hike up to the top of all these mountains. The lesson they took from growing up in what is basically a swamp is that they should go to places where nature is pretty and high and walk all over it. The lesson I took from nature is that it's full of stinging insects, alligators, snakes, and the very real possibility of hypoxia on a too-tall mountain top. E.g., I've hated hiking (and still do, though I'll do it to get somewhere pretty).

The real 'vacation' for me was that our hotel in Tennessee had a pool and a hot tub. I remember how awesome it was to sit in it as a kid, and then to read my book at the time -- a giant, phonebook-sized copy of Asimov robot stories. My crowning achievement for the trip was convincing my parents that I was happiest reading (possibly in the hot tub), and that I would be very, very happy if I could just read while they hiked.

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So, flashing forward to the present, every time a hotel has a hot tub, I would agitate to go sit in it. I love the bubbles, I love the smell of chlorine, and I think about how awesome it is to be in a hot tub rather than being on a hike. :)

Our awesome hotel in Santa Fe had this hot tub on the roof, and I nagged Betsy into going. The only problem was that Santa Fe was 65 and super, super windy when we went, so it was an exercise of staying in the tub, then running inside once we were done.

For this photo, I told Betsy to get down at eye level, and I tried my best to pop my head over the surface of the pool. The composition is mine, but I'm convinced she gets a better look out of me than anyone else -- normally I'm at a loss in front of the camera, but she took what was one of the best instaxes of the trip right here.