No Tickey. No Laundry.

The majority of travel bloggers will tell you about the glamour of travel. Multi-star restaurants, spas, wine tours, nightlife. Others will highlight the free stuff. Churches you can tour without a guide, opera houses with midweek freebies, petting zoos for the kiddos. None of them ever mention the ugly, fatty underbelly of travel. For some, this means a city without Uber. For others, it might be an airport without a luxury lounge. For the solo-budget-conscious-multi-week-hump-it-in-hump-it-out-catch-a-daily-workout traveler, it's laundry.

Yes, laundry. Let me tell you how quickly one person can run through underwear. Ok, let me not. It's not pretty. Even in Scandinavia in the late winter. I can only imagine traveling in a sweaty climate at a sweaty time of year. It's production would be terrifyingly exponential.

I can hear the objections now -

• Pack more? If it doesn't fit on my back it doesn't travel. Given that there's only so much room in my bag (my only concessions to space are for my running shoes and running clothes) and I have to wear more than underwear, bras, and socks... I'll let you do the math. I usually pack enough for a week and I usually run out around Day 6. 
• Buy more? I don't know about other places, but everything is expensive in Scandinavia. Including bras and panties. Not saying I haven't bought new on previous trips when I got monumentally sick of living in a Chinese laundry (more on that...) but I'm determined not to go over-budget this time. And barely a week in, I can already see it on the horizon. Yes, I'll pay any amount of money for a guided run through a new city......even if it means eating at 7-11 while wearing dirty underwear. 
• Wear them inside out? No. Just no. Not that I haven't by accident. You get dressed in a windowless hotel room and see if you can get it right. 
• Go to a laundromat? Since they are pretty much non-existent in Sweden, I actually considered finding one before I left Copenhagen. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon one while walking the streets of Vesterboro. Let me tell you, even something as simple a washing machine becomes mind-numbingly complex in Danish. For reference, a couple days later, in Sweden, I struggled to determine if a bottle was laundry detergent or fabric softener and I can read a modicum of Swedish (For the record, I'm making the fabric softener work).  There was no way I was going to successfully launder anything if it meant doing it in Danish. And cash. I'm pretty sure I was going to need some and I seldom carry it abroad. Why? So until I traveled, I never understood why the non-English speaking customers at The World's Largest Home Improvement Retailer where I work invariably pay for even the smallest purchases in $100 bills. First, you don't have to understand the amount the cashier tells you. Just hand over the big bill and trust him/her to give you the correct change. Second, foreign money can be a mind-fuck unless you pay super close attention. Thus, I love and rely exclusively on my MasterCard. From what I could tell, the laundromat was cash-only. Of course everything was in Danish so I could be wrong. 
• Find someone pretty and act helpless until she/he does it for me? You've met me, right? 
• Use the hotel laundry service? One, I don't stay at the kind of hotels that offer laundry service. Two, even if I did, I couldn't/wouldn't squeeze it into the budget. If I can't afford new, I can't afford to have someone wash the dirty, old stuff for me.

Thanks to one fortuitous tennis weekend when I roomed with a friend who had been in the Peace Corps, I learned how to do laundry in a hotel room. Wash in sink, ring out, hang over shower curtain rod. Easy, right? Except when your hotel room bathroom is smaller than a closet and lacks a shower curtain rod (my current shower curtain runs in a track along the ceiling). This set-up is common in the European budget hotels I usually stay in. Yesterday, as I was contemplating hitting up a Clas-Ohlson (a home improvement-type store in Sweden) for a some clothes line and clothes pins, I saw it snaking down the wall in the bathroom - a towel warmer. Hey, Scandinavia is cold. Can't put a price on a warm towel. Or, as luck would have it, dry laundry.

So, I skipped the hardware store and headed to a grocery store to find laundry detergent. I wanted a bottle of something small and cheap that would be easy enough to transport city to city. Because of the tiny and somewhat blurred writing on the bottles and my inherent laziness (in my defense, it was late in the day on a travel day), I didn't bother with Google Translate to determine exactly what I was buying. I twisted off the cap and took a whiff. It smelled good enough, especially since the price was well within budget. Ok, turns out it's fabric softener and not detergent. Last night, I rationalized in my exhaustion that my unmentionables would at least soft and smell decent. This morning, after a good night's sleep, I washed a "load" - a long sleeve base layer and a pair of panties - in body wash then used the fabric softener. Boom! Clean and soft. You won't read that kind of advice in your typical travel blog. 

Because I seem to produce it as fast as I can wash it and dry it, I'll be running a Chinese laundry out of my bathroom for the remaining ten days of my vacation. Not even a week in and the glamour is already gone. Not that there was much to begin with. 

***  I thought maybe my reference to a Chinese laundry might be less than inclusive so I checked with Google. The entire first page was about a brand of women's shoes and a nightclub in Sydney. Moreover, according to the Urban Dictionary, the phrase " No tickey, no laundry" is a catchphrase in Northern NY meaning that commitment is preferred over a one-night stand. Yeah, I think I'm ok. ***