Taking the Low Road

Take a little liquid laundry soap and be prepared to do hand laundry.

Here’s where I can get on a tear if I don’t watch myself. For reasons unfathomable to me, washers and dryers in the U.K. (and in all of Europe, from what I can tell), are absolutely pathetic. No matter how you slice it, one load in their teeny little front-loading washers (half a load in even an average-size U.S. washer) and anemic dryers takes three hours – minimum. That’s if you’re not drying jeans or towels; they take longer. Yes, longer, as in four hours.

Why? Why? Why? Most European countries have 240-volt electricity. They could toast their clothes in 10 minutes if they would just make their electrical engineers put on their little thinking caps. But I digress.

Now we’re back to the get-as-much-as-possible-from-our-trip mentality. We’re not babysitting laundry for four hours, period. You can if you want to, but we’ve found it’s quicker to hand-wash clothes as we go, let them line-dry while we’re out touring, and iron only if we really, really did a rotten job of pressing out the wrinkles by hand before hanging.

“Why not just drop them off at a local laundry?” you ask. That’s more time spent finding a reputable one and more than a little angst spent hoping they don’t turn my clothes into doll’s clothes. I simply don’t trust anyone else not to shrink my clothes. Since we pack very, very light, we can’t afford to have even one piece of our miniscule travel wardrobe taken out of the game.

Besides, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. First off, we’re not getting filthy digging ditches all day: we’re walking leisurely through world-class museums and historical houses. Secondly, it rarely gets what we’d call HOT in Scotland. Their summer “warm” is a wimpy 65 degrees. We just don’t get hot enough or exert enough effort to make it necessary to launder our clothes after every wearing, or even after every other wearing . . . or sometimes even after a whole week of wearing. Really.

After the first two trips, we realized that we Americans think we have to launder our clothes a lot more than is actually necessary. Taking a page from the previous generations on both sides of the pond – who managed to live without automatic washers and dryers somehow – we hang our clothes in such a way that they can air out each night or during the day while we tour. Guess what? A lot of odors dissipate after 24 hours of hanging time.

So lighten up, resign yourself to a little hand laundry, and skip the expense of paying someone else to launder your clothes. Try out the washers and dryers if you like. Who knows? You might get lucky. But if your experience is the same as ours, you won’t be unpleasantly surprised and you will be mentally prepared to suds up your duds in the sink.

(I don’t have to tell you, do I, that packing dry-clean-only clothes is about as un-thrifty a wardrobe choice as you could make?)