[Kara] Kara's Rules of Travel Laundry

We packed light for this trip.  All of my clothes, shoes and toiletries (plus some random family equipment) fits in a 21" rolling suitcase (carry-on sized).  I brought three pairs of pants, one pair of shorts, two skirts and seven shirts . . . to wear for six months and to accommodate all weather conditions.  Everyone else in the family packed similarly.  It totally works, but it requires careful attention to clothing and laundry management.

This is a stock photo, not my own picture.  But now I think maybe I need to take photos of the beautiful and interesting laundry we find hanging out to dry around the world

Kara's first rule of travel laundry is:  Wear it more than once!  All you laundry-managing parents know the feeling of finding a worn-once nightgown or sweatshirt in the dirty clothes hamper because your little darling finds it easier to toss it in the hamper than to put it away and wear it again.  It's a pet peeve of mine at home, but on the road it becomes crazy-making.

Yes, we have long days and wet days and hot, stinky days.  Yes, we spill on our clothes and there are times that clothes can't reasonably be worn twice.  But most of the time, with proper care, we can get at least two wearings out of each item of clothing.

Kara's second rule of travel laundry is:  When you take it off, hang it up.  I don't care if it's hung on a hanger, a peg, the back of a chair or even on the edge of the tub.  It has to be hung up so that it can air out.  I'm a big believer in airing out.  Stinky clothes can smell fresh the next day after a good airing (OK, not always, but lots of the time), and we need to take advantage of that.

Kara's third rule of travel laundry is:  If it's dirty, don't pack it with your clean clothes.  Because our clothes don't qualify as dirty until they're dirty, and packing dirty clothes next to clean clothes makes the clean ones gross.  Clean clothes stay in the packing cubes.  Worn-once-and-will-be-worn-again clothes get packed outside of the packing cubes.  Really dirty clothes are kept in separate plastic bags in suitcases until laundry day.

Kara's fourth rule of travel laundry is: Never use the hotel laundry service.  Even in Vietnam where we are now, and where my family had a delicious sit-down lunch yesterday in one of the nicer restaurants in the city for the same price as a McDonalds meal at home, it would cost a fortune to have the hotel do our laundry.  They charge $2 to wash a single t-shirt in our hotel, and that's a bargain compared to most hotels in the world.  Instead, I regularly do our laundry by hand in the hotel bathtub or sink a few nights a week. (I'll explain my process in a future blog post.)

Kara's fifth rule of travel laundry is one I just learned yesterday:  Send it out.  Our local tour guide said he knew a place that would wash our clothes for a fraction of the cost of the hotel.  So I packed three plastic shopping bags full of dirty clothes and gave them to a pleasant woman in a convenience store.  She weighed them 4.7 kilos and charged me 22,000 Vietnamese Dong a kilo.  That equals $5 . . . to wash and dry and fold at about two full loads of laundry.  Plus the clothes were delivered back to our hotel at the end of the day.  Dreamy!