onlyme, . It is so difficult. Could you go along with the hotel visit theme with her, suggest you try a night, and as you say you need to slip away unnoticed when you go do just that. It is so easy to make suggestions when you are not coping with the problem.
I can speak with such clarity about how I managed things, but that is not what it was like at the time. It was constantly feeling at a loss, at a disadvantage, coping with something I had no experience of until thrown in the deep end. Finding one strategy worked with one relation but not with the other.
Even now every couple of weeks when I visit my aunt I do not know how I will find her. On really good days she is in the dayroom or sitting in the chair in her room and we can have an animated if sometimes surreal conversation about fellow residences and life in the care home, other times she is sleepy and says little, or even unwakeably asleep so that I sit beside her with my Kindle for 45 minutes and then go home. At worse she is distressed and living in some other world where I am mistaken for a carer, or someone she knew a long time ago.
Probably, Onlyme, the one thing we can offer you is a sounding board for your difficulties and problems with people, many of whom recognise your experiences only too well.