The Grime!
Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you all are having a restful, quiet day. Our celebration is pretty low key; we watched the sunrise on the Badwater Salt Flats, 282 feet below sea level, and then went for a hike out another beautiful canyon. We’ll throw dinner on the grill at some point, going with sausage scrounged from our freezer instead of turkey this year. As you kick back on the couch in your own food coma, we thought we’d amuse you with another fun fact of RV life: dirt and grime.
When we lived in the world of indoor plumbing and pavement, life was pretty different. Like most of the US, we showered almost every day, and our apartment stayed pretty clean without us trying too hard. We didn’t have a washer/dryer the last four years, but fortunately in SF, wash & folds are ubiquitous and cost about the same as the laundromat, so our clothes were clean, too.
Camping, however, has turned this cleanliness on its head. On trails we can now easily detect what we call “hotel people” simply because they smell freshly bathed. My oily skin has left me with fairly permanent lines of red dirt on the middle of my shins where my hiking socks end. And owing to Lisa’s infrequent haircuts, she regularly looks like an electrocuted clown as her shaggy unwashed curls sprout in twenty directions at once.
Yes, the Minnie has a shower, but it’s very tiny. We don’t know if people much larger than us could use it, but it works. There is, however, one small catch: the shower can only be used when we have a guaranteed source of water and a place to dump our tanks. Seems simple enough, but only a handful of places we’ve camped have afforded us this luxury. Mostly, we have to make our 40 gallon water tank last multiple days, thus, showering is no longer a daily occurrence in in our world. Typically, we get to shower once a week, but occasionally circumstances are such that even that isn’t possible. Our current record is held by me: 11 days without a shower. We do occasionally resort to bucket baths as those we can take with just two liters of water, but mostly it’s baby wipes and copious quantities of deodorant that keep us smelling acceptable enough to be around other humans.
The laundry, oh the laundry. Most of the time we do it by hand and then hang it up to dry in the campground for all to see. The work involved definitely gives us pause about whether something is really dirty. With the exception of underwear (one use only) our present rules are that clothing is clean until you can smell it from five feet away or it can stand of its own accord. Fortunately, we have stayed with some very kind friends who have let us behave like college students home on break with overflowing laundry bags. Our socks will never be white again, but that’s ok by us; the joy and peace we have out here is way better than clean clothes.
Rock and sand and pine needles are pernicious creatures. Dirt is almost always directly outside our front door, so even though we were never huge cleaners before, we now sweep almost daily. We never thought that doormats would need to be purchased in bulk, but the persistent dirt also means it doesn’t take long before our doormats become unsalvageable. We are already on rugs four and five of our adventure.
Lest our general filth scare you into ruling out RV adventures entirely, know that lots of folks who live in RVs don’t make these kinds of compromises. They stay in RV parks with water and sewer lines, and go to laundromats frequently. We however, have grown used to the grime. And, I for one, would so much rather be out in the desert under a cottonwood tree hanging clothes I washed by hand than sitting in a parking lot waiting for a dryer.
