travellingbennetts

Yeah, I know it’s not typically an entrancing topic, it’s up there with discussing income taxes and how bad the traffic is on your daily commute.  However, maintaining enough clothing in a reasonable state of cleanliness while on a lengthy motorcycle expedition is a matter of necessity.

Our current 5 month trip to all Lower 48 USA states has been a wonderful adventure – interspersed by the tedium of laundry. Particularly important during the early 2 months of southern USA where temperatures were up around 40 deg C and high humidity.

My experience is that what you can carry in two panniers and a top box does not allow the luxury of more than 6 days of clean clothing – unless recycling of under garments is practised.

The under-appreciated routine of home whereby every week a load is dumped into the machine, hung on the line and eventually folded and put away is a sweet memory when on the road.

Intricate strategising with time and motion studies, google maps and hotel websites consulted and finally the act of the laundry performance can begin.

The following modes of laundry execution are dissected in my order of preference:

Staying with friends, and using their laundry facilities.  A bonus of being able to chat with said friend/s and pet their dogs while the laundry is laundering.

Then there is DIY at the Air BnB. These are fabulous. You often have unlimited detergent, maybe some for sensitive things, a “let’s go straight to ground zero” bleach, and no restrictions on usage. I think my socks just touched the floor, let’s throw them in for a pre-emptive cycle.

Then the hotel with full facilities, no need to wander outside.  Sometimes this is at no cost and includes detergent but most times hotels charge. Usually they provide whatever is required at reception, such as coins or chemicals. This means you don’t have to lug your bag of fragrant laundry around the streets or pack them into the bike pannier if the laundromat is further than walking distance.

A method we used mainly in South America was dropping the bags of laundry into a Lavanderia (as they are known in Spanish) and it is washed and dried on site usually within the day and charged by the kg, typically $3 to $5 for 2 bags of laundry. Every town has several of these facilities centrally located to hotels.

Then there is the method we have mostly used over the past 5 months – DIY at coin laundromats.  These are clean and efficient in the USA we have found and usually have a very helpful attendant. One I particularly recall was in Boise, Idaho where the payment mode was to buy a pre-loaded card to use in the machines.  The attendant could tell we “weren’t from around here” and gave us the cards without the loading charge.

The problem is change, and invariably the machines use quarters (the largest denomination coin in use here) and the wash cycle is around $4 and the dry cycle $3.  That is a lot of quarters to manage and I have at times dropped them and had to fish around the spider webs under the Maytag, yikes.  Although carrying around a small snap lock bag of quarters would make a good weapon in event of a street mugging. 

Sometimes Google Maps sets us up for failure. When in Fez, Morocco last year Duncan did his research and found two close by Laundromats and we mentioned this to our friends Nic and Margreth.  They accompanied us on the ensuing “laundry death march” with bags bulging as we found one then the other facilities were shut with the neighbourhood socio-economics declining significantly.

We have at times used the hotel service where you fill out the “laundry list” and dump it at reception.  This is easy but usually quite expensive, we had a particularly bad experience in Lima, Peru in 2023 where we selected the “express” service and it cost the equivalent of $190 AUD for a bag!! Ironically, the clothes we had laundered were not worth that much.

Although when travelling through Africa we did use this method successfully, except a memorable occasion in Khartoum, Sudan when the hotel specified it could not launder ladies undergarments.  The room was festooned with my “smalls” while Duncan’s got the hands-on royal laundry treatment.

Then my least favourite method, washing the garments in the hotel room and trying to get them dry by the time we leave. This means instructing the other inhabitant of the hotel room that whenever they find themselves in the bathroom, they must rearrange every hanging item into a state of low enough moisture to satisfy either wearing or storage for the next week. Our friend Peter we travelled South America with had one change of clothes and he would wash one set each evening and if his garments were not dry the following morning he would put into a string bag attached to his bike to dry – a legend!

There is a meme I have seen that states that you actually never have every item of clothing clean, and some have been known to “go commando” so almost everything is washed. Staying at a Naturist Colony would be actually ideal if the thought did not terrify me.

To conclude, until a clever inventor comes up with disposable, eco friendly garments then we will be cursed with the laundry chore – a cinch at home but a logistical planning necessity on the road.