Trip Fundamentals - To Shower Or Not To Shower
Our next couple blog entries will talk about hygiene, an obviously important thing to give attention to when living in a vehicle for an extended amount of time. Keeping your face and body clean is very important when living in a cramped space. An undesirable smell will attach itself to everything, as well as get unwanted attention from your traveling partner(s) or folks you may encounter on the road. What we’ll cover in this blog is showering/not showering on the road.
As long as we’re not exerting ourselves, such as a strenuous hike, or driving long hours in triple-digit temperatures, we don’t shower every day when traveling in our Vanagon. This may be due to rationing our water supply, parking overnight in a parking lot, etc. If we have a day where we opt out of showering, we use face wipes, body wipes, body sprays and powders to stay somewhat clean and smelling fresh. And, to be 100% truthful, there have been long days of driving (15+ hours) in the past where we are both super-tired, and we’ll agree that we’re just gonna be dirty together.
If we do decide to shower, we have used a few options in the past to get clean:
1. Truck Stops - The showers in most truck stops are very large and very clean. They normally charge around $12-15 per shower. If you are traveling with someone with whom you are comfortable showering, get clean together! It’s a half-price shower! One plus of choosing to shower at a truck stop is the location. Having your shower just off a highway exit will save on travel time.
2. Paid Showers in Parks - Many parks/campgrounds have shower houses where you can pay per shower. Most showers at parks we have used in the past cost around $5. A couple drawbacks to showering in parks are: you may not have hot water, or you may have a time limit to get clean.
3. Get a Room - We normally splurge on a nice hotel room one evening on our longer adventures. We use that night to take a long, hot shower in a large bathroom to keep ourselves feeling clean. Sometimes you just don’t feel 100% clean after showering outside.
4. Showering using our van’s shower setup - We’ve set up a little shower using our van’s rear hatch: We have a self-pressurized water tank made by WaterPORT that attaches to our rear bumper’s tow hitch. We also affix a large tarp made by Kelty to our hatch to act as a shower curtain for privacy. We can usually get set up and be ready for a shower in just a few minutes. If we know we’ll be stopping in colder weather, we bring along a propane powered water heater for our showers to be a bit more comfortable. We went through a lot of trial and error before arriving at this setup. It seems to work very well for us. An added bonus of showering under the hatch is the window in our hatch gives us a “sunlight” in our shower! Sometimes when we are “wild camping” in the wilderness with no one else around, we choose to shower with no shower curtain. There’s some type of indescribable feeling you get showering in nature. Just be sure to have a lookout for anyone approaching!
We are very mindful of the products we use when showering outside. We wanna be sure we are doing all we can to limit the environmental impact our products have. We don’t use anything that is not organic or contains harmful chemicals. We also try to keep waste to a minimum by using refillable bottles or reusable packaging.
That wraps up our little shower blog. Next time we’ll get into items to pack regarding hygiene/not looking like you are living in a van.
-BINK