Forget Bali, I found bliss in the blandness of a chain hotel

I was in a chain hotel 20 miles north of Orlando for meetings that would last, on and off, for four days. This was not a holiday resort. Outside, the rain was bathwater warm, the pool windswept and empty. Inside, guests wandered the conference facilities, lanyards swinging. The breakfast buffet was like the idea I’d had as a child of how millionaires live: all the pineapple you could eat. It is a truism of escape plans that the problem with going anywhere is that you take yourself with you. But there is an exception to this, and I have found it. Burnt out? Always yelling? So tired you would gladly hand over your humanity to Elon Musk for a chance to become fully digitised? There’s another way. Open Google Maps, find a place that is not a place but, rather, on the way to other places, and select the blandest hotel you can find. Then go and sit in it for four days. I swear to God, it’s better than six months in Bali.

On the second day, after my meetings, I went down to the hotel lobby. The sliding doors opened and the chill air contracted in the dank Florida day. I did some laps of the car park, talking on the phone to friends, then went inside and ate wings. Back in the room, I lay on the bed, looking through the sliding glass doors towards the highway. I thought about sending an email and didn’t. I took a three-hour nap, went downstairs and ordered more wings. No one spoke to me, looked at me or confirmed I existed.

The next day, I stepped out. Florida isn’t made for walking. The only viable destination was a branch of Applebee’s (a restaurant) a mile up the highway. After 15 minutes, the pavement disappeared. Wow, this is how it ends, I thought: in a dusty underpass outside Orlando; how disappointing and yet true to the essence of journalism: risking your life for bad food. At Applebee’s, the air smelled of mildew and ant powder. The waitress and I exchanged looks approximating the sentiment, “Smile, we’ll soon be dead.”

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I felt like the heroine of that Anne Tyler novel where she drops out of her life because no one in her house ever says thank you. I was invisible, weightless, immune to the passage of time. When I got back, I lay on the bed and exchanged text messages with someone towards whom my feelings aren’t ambivalent, though my feelings about those feelings are deeply ambivalent, and wondered, briefly, what my children were doing.

By the third night, I became aware that I was thanking the staff in the hotel restaurant with the over-emphasis of someone exhibiting largesse to those less fortunate than herself, and that they were talking to me in the gentle tones of trained professionals managing a 43-year-old woman who hadn’t left the hotel for 24 hours and had clearly only packed one sweater. If I was Hunter S Thompson, I thought, I would be using this time to knock myself out at the minibar (there was no minibar) and do something dynamic like watch porn. Instead, I bought two Twixes from the shop, went back upstairs and watched that clip of Maggie Smith reading John Betjeman that’s been doing the rounds. I reloaded it four times for the way she says “tea”.

On the last day, in the deep silence of the room, I felt a novel sensation. What even was that? Wait, it couldn’t be, could it? Oh my God, it was boredom. I got up and went to the desk. A tiny miracle: I wanted to work.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist