Laundry drying in Italy

One of the issues that comes up when you have only three sets of clothes and you are sweating in them most every day is laundry. Not washing your clothes really isn’t an option – you’re just asking for saddle sores, among other reasons.

Since we were camping or staying in hotels, there weren’t a lot of easily accessibly washing machines on our route. Actually, some of the campgrounds had washing machines, but we balked at the idea of paying 3 euros just to wash a load of laundry. Good grief, we don’t have that much! And I’m the one who decided to drive to the laundromat (and do other errands once a week) when the laundry in our last apartment went from $1.50 to $2.00 for either washer or dryer.

The first option was to rinse things out in the shower while you wash yourself. We brought a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s, and figured it would be good for washing pretty much everything. I knew about the shower technique because I read Andrew X. Pham’s description of just that in Catfish and Mandala. In campgrounds, then, we washed our innermost layers with ourselves in the shower, then hung them to dry overnight on trees or bikes. That worked okay, as long as it didn’t rain during the night.

Inevitably, though, after a few days it seemed like pretty much everything was dirty. Then we would stop at a hotel, and do a larger operation.

First, put all the laundry in the bath tub, fill with hot water and soap, and let it sit for a bit. Then, the agitation cycle, aka stomping and trying not to slip and fall down.

Human powered laundry agitation

After two rinses, the next step is to wring everything out, and try to get out as much water as possible so there is a hope of it all drying out before the next morning. After wringing and re-wringing, we would roll things up in a towel, and stomp on it a bit, to absorb water from the laundry into the towel. We created a fairly humid atmosphere in some places.

Even with the limited amount of clothing we had with us, this became quite a chore. Mostly the wringing. Stomping in a tub full of wet clothes is kind of fun. But you wring things out, and then you twist them up again and pull and turn and there’s always more water, but you start to feel something giving. Am I destroying the elastic? Pulling out seams? But if I don’t wring it out vigorously, will I be facing wet shorts in the morning?

The taller half got a blister from vigorous laundry-wringing. We gained a new respect for washerwomen of old. We also decided, by the time we left Spain, that the 3 euro price we’d seen for use of a washing machine in the first campground? Not so exorbitant as it had seemed at the time.

Throughout France we visited self-service laundries, where we found prices ranging from 3 to 5 euros for 5 kg capacity washer, and another 4 euros or so for a dryer. There were often machines that took 1 euro or so to dispense a cupful of powdered soap. In Italy, the self-service laundry was rarer, but still available.

These little laundries were not too much like American laundromats. Most only had a few machines, 3 to 5 on average. And they are of various sizes, 5 kilos, 7 kilos, 10 kilos, maybe as large as 14 kilos. The price for using the machine is graded accordingly. There is not a slot on the machines to put in your coins, though. There is a central paybox, where you put in your coins and then push the number of the machine you want to start up. Every time I triple checked the number, frightened that I would waste 4 euros by pressing the wrong button.

Then, I would wait for 40 minutes while the washer went through its cycle, writing in my journal or my novel (oh yes, I’m working on a novel, but no, it’s not about bike touring in Europe), and people watching on the sly. In Narbonne, France, I had a chat with a (probably) German young man about how the machines worked. I also had a non-conversation with an old lady who asked me questions in French that I couldn’t understand. In Cavaillon, France, I listed to the squishy foam rubber sounds of talk between a Portugese woman and her mother while they waited for their clothes to dry. In La Spezia, Italy, I had a half-conversation with a group of four tourists who were trying to figure out the system of the paybox. After they began talking amongst themselves, I realized they were Spanish, and we probably could have communicated better in that language than my pieced together Italian. I’m sure there were locals using the laundries as well, but they are certainly a boon to the traveler.

Now that we’re back in the States, we have a washer-dryer unit in our apartment, and it’s pretty amazing. I never have to look for change, or worry about wandering away while the load is running. And I can read all the instructions.