So, What About Laundry?

As most of you know from reading about how we packed for a year travel, we took just enough clothing to get us through about a week of travel. I brought a few extra items compared to Ricardo, like an extra pair of shorts and more undies (which I was grateful for during the Camino)! This plan has worked out great since we are carrying everything we own in our backpacks, but this also means needing to do laundry more often than we’d like.


Starting off in Ireland, we got more use out of our jeans and jackets than anything else, so by the time we made it to Málaga, Spain, it was time to whip out our summer gear which was still clean! We were lucky to have a washing machine in our Airbnb there, so we refreshed everything before heading to our home in Granada where we also had our own washing machine for a month. No worries there!



Then we landed in Morocco for two weeks. We traveled too quickly to figure out where and how to do laundry. Let’s just say that we stretched the limits of acceptable wear of most of our clothing until we made it to our Airbnb in Casablanca which had a washer.



Oh, the Camino de Santiago. I could probably write a novel about our laundry during that month, but I’ll spare you most of the details. I quickly learned that wearing a pair of socks more than once was completely acceptable (let’s face it, everyone else smelled bad too). On “laundry day” it was a race to get to the albergue so that we had enough time to hand wash our clothes and get them hung in the sun as early as possible to dry. Sometimes we splurged and paid a hotel about $10 to wash and dry our “bag of death.” These were glorious days. Tip: Travel with some kind of bag to separate your clean from dirty clothes. The bag our packing cubes came in works awesome and has a drawstring (it’s washable too!).   



I was talking to my sister one day while we were in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and she was telling me how lucky I was to be in such great weather and how nice it must be. On Facetime I showed her what I was doing in that moment and explained that backpacking isn’t always as glamorous as it seems in Instagram or Facebook photos. I was washing dirty clothes in the sink! Tip: Bars of soap from hotels or body wash work great as laundry soap on the fly!



I never thought I’d actually say that I like being able to do my own laundry... When we got to Guanajuato, Mexico, in order to get our laundry done we had to drop it off for service and pick it up the next day. We weren’t lucky enough to have our own machine in our apartment. So, we would make the 15-20 minute walk to the Lavanderia, and the lady would weigh our clothes and we’d pay her some pesos (about $7-8 to wash and dry). This wasn’t a big deal, but sometimes the scent of the soap was a bit too much, and it wasn’t fun lugging our clothes back and forth!



South America is very similar. We had to drop it off and pick it up the next day. Since we were traveling through Uruguay very quickly, only staying places one night, it was incredibly difficult to leave our laundry overnight. So, you guessed it, we were beachin’ it anyway and held off until we got to our hostel in Punta del Este where we had 2 nights and time to ship off our laundry!

We've been searching for our next home in Buenos Aires, and I told Ricardo I found an Airbnb with a free washer and dryer in the building. His response was, "They sure know the way to your heart, don't they?" I guess it's the little things that excite me after being on the road nearly 8 months. :)