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Laundromat runs are one of the many less-than-glamorous realities of full-time RV living. They don’t rival the misery of tank-dumping day, but they’re up there in the hassle-factor. To carve out a half-day to gather every scrap of anything that even remotely needs to be washed, find a laundromat, travel there, take care of business, and head back to camp is a colossal hassle.
Once we settled down into our sticks-and-bricks, we at least removed the exercise of figuring out where to do laundry. It was some level of relief to have a predictable, known place and not have to research where to go every time laundry day rolled back around.
But we still had to go through the motions of the whole process even though we’d removed a portion of the misery. Over time we got it down to as lean as we could on the time investment. It still took about three to four hours, though.
Bizarre barometer
Because laundry days were an all-in event as far as the need to wash everything at once, we realized that what was in the laundry was a bizarre barometer of our lives and how we were spending our time in the big picture.
That became more evident after moving into the house. The amount of cleaning cloths, paint-splattered shirts, pants with garden dirt ground in at the knees, and nicer clothing for actual social outings became our indicators of what we’d been up to.
Most important was how many pairs of motorcycling socks were in the wash load, though. The laundry days with several pair in the mix allowed us to reminisce about our recent rides while folding. The laundry days with no motorcycling socks to fold? Ouch. A painful reminder to make sure we carve out the time to do the thing we love most.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
Annie Dillard
Sweet relief
A little while ago, we quite unexpectedly found ourselves in possession of laundry machines at home again. After four years of the laundry day ordeal, we can now sprinkle wash loads into our day as needed. It’s no longer an “event” we have to schedule. And it’s glorious.
Of course, now that we don’t do all the laundry all at once, the how-we’ve-spent-our-days exercise is quite a bit less obvious. We’ll have to find other ways to remind ourselves to not let the “tasks of life” control our lives. But we’ve at least removed laundry day as one of those tasks that torpedoes having days set aside for fun. We’re good with that.
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