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Travel Tips From The Intentional Travelers
We often travel with friends or family and they are always amazed at high lightly we travel. At the same time we’re equally amazed at how much luggage they’re hauling around as they travel. Leaving for a thirty day trip we usually travel with two carry-on suitcases and two backpacks*.
Laundry while on the road can be expensive and a real pain, but there are solutions (pun intended) to help with this chore.
Our first tip is to carry the right clothes. Polyester was designed just for this purpose and it isn’t anything like the clingy, static generating fabrics of the past.* A surprising amount of our travel clothes are polyester. From shirts and slacks to socks and underwear it”s mostly either polyester or nylon. All it takes is a quick wash in a sink, ring and shake out and in just a few hours it’s ready to wear again.
Having enough clean clothes while traveling is always a concern. If you’re on a ship, laundry services can be pretty costly although “frequent cruisers” often get free or reduced pricing on a limited amount of laundry. If you’re traveling on your own, you may be able to get laundry services at your hotel but that also comes at a premium price. The other alternative is to find a laundromat (more common in the US then overseas) and spend a few hours washing, drying and folding your clothes.
A better solution is to travel with clothes that wash and dry quickly. There are any number of brands on the market that are lightweight and can be washed in a sink and then hung to dry in the bathtub/shower. The advantage here is that these clothes take up less room in your suitcase, generally wrinkle less or not at all and, because they can be quickly washed, you can pack fewer items.
Three great products to help you handle your own laundry are a universal sink stopper, travel size packs of detergent packets or sheets and an inflatable hanger. The sink stopper is necessary when you end up with a sink that doesn’t have a good stopper a nd won’t hold water. The travel size detergent packs take up little space and, because they are single use, they can be disposed of as you use them. The travel hanger takes almost no space and can be blown up when needed and then deflated when it’s time to move on. It also will eliminate those puckers in your tops made by hangers.
Two other essentials we carry that come in handy.
*To be fair Dennis’ backpack that he tries to keep under 40 pounds, is a MilSpec thing with Molle pouches attached. He claims the pack keeps him organized.
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