Travel Tips
Washing Clothes
Generally, any time that you are staying in one place for more than night you can wash out your underwear and lightweight, or quick drying, socks and expect them to dry before you leave for the next destination. If you are staying for more than two nights you can wash larger items and have them ready to wear again. We have washed almost everything except jeans this way and, in the process, have learned some strategies that have worked well for us.
First of all you don't have to have laundry detergent. Bar soap or shampoo provided by the hotel will do just as well.
It helps if you have a clothesline with you that you can string in the bathroom but you can be creative if you don't have one. Sometimes hotels have retractable clotheslines. Hangers from the closet might be able to be used by hanging them over a shower rod thus increasing the number of items that you can hang. You can take all the towels off the towel rods and drape clothes over them. We have even draped socks or underwear over lamps that were turned on to aid the drying process. (You have to be careful with this one!) You can be creative in many ways. Just use your imagination.
The one strategy that we find most useful is using the towels that are provided by the hotel. We make certain to take our baths or showers first and try to share one towel. Then after washing our clothes in the sink, rinsing them out and wringing them as best we can, we lay them flat on a dry bath towel. Roll the towel with the clothes inside as tightly as possible and squeeze the moisture out. The clothes don't wrinkle that way and it is amazing how dry they become and how quickly they will be completely dry. (In hotels where towels are not changed daily, such as most of those in Europe, make certain you put your wet towels on the floor of the bath so that they will be replaced with fresh ones the next day.)
When we stayed with friends we sometimes used their washing machines but didn't want to impose on them too much or take too much time away from visiting with them so we tried to minimize that. Likewise we found that at our villa in Rome we could hang our clothes (that we had hand-washed) on an outside clotheslines. We found Laundromats in London and used them on two occasions. We had the hotel launder a few better items in one location, but generally found that we could keep most of our clothes fresh through the methods mentioned above throughout our 11 weeks of travel.
Happy traveling. We hope that you found our meanderings useful and that you have many adventures and unexpected surprises along the road in your own journeys.
Godspeed !
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