March 24, 2011
Laundry around the world
How did we do laundry people have asked.
In New Zealand we rented an RV and stayed in campgrounds which all had washing facilities. New Zealand has beautiful campgrounds close to wonderful sites, complete with shared kitchens, bathrooms, hot showers, playground equipment, some with beautiful swimming pools and of course, washers and dryers or lines to dry your things. Doing laundry in New Zealand was easy.
In Australia we did laundry at Youth Hostels (where you can be any age to stay by the way - we stayed with other families and also met traveling retirees). All the Youth Hostels we stayed at had washers and dryers where you put in tokens or change.
In terms of the rest of the world we stayed in short term apartments with washer/dryers; friends homes (thank you for everything - including sharing your washers :o)); in Rome Paul took the laundry on the subway to a laundromat; in the Czech Republic the owner of the short term apartment did our laundry for free (!) in their brand new machines; and a few places we hand washed things in sinks and dried them overnight. In China and in Thailand we brought our things to full service laundry places to be washed as it was so inexpensive. In Australia the detergents are all environmentally sound and while our clothes did get clean when we had them washed in China, not sure what they used, but our whites were really white!!!
In terms of doing our own laundry we packed clothes that were fast drying so you could wash them and they would dry overnight. We sometimes did a little hand washing and would hang things out to dry. In countries with warm weather and low humidity things dried easily overnight - all but China where it was winter - everywhere else it was essentially summer due to the time of year we traveled. Both children did insist on bringing jeans, and, as it was very important to them to bring their jeans and feel comfortable in something they were used to wearing let them bring one pair of jeans each. We all also had one pair of light packing travel pants. It all worked out fine as we could find places to wash clothes often enough and things would dry really fast in the low humidity (unlike the East Coast of the US with its high humidity in the summer). (The one pair of technical fabric pants we each brought could zip-off and become shorts - the technical fabric was great for washing and drying fast and the zip-off portion great for traveling to places where you might be in hot weather and want to wear shorts but then need pants to enter a Church or Temple, for example.)
I brought along a 'Rick Steves' laundry line that we could use to hang up to dry clothes. It has a twisted rubber line so you don't need clothes pins you just pull apart the rubber line and push the clothes in and the lines pop back together to hold the clothes The laundry line we got has Velcro on either end to tie it up - you could wrap it around a tree, a bathroom facet, a balcony railing, etc.. It worked very well and was very handy for bathing suits. (Here's a link to a picture of the laundry line http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B00332F1WY/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0?ie=UTF8&index=0)
Happy laundry,
Jackie
