We’ve been travelling for 10 months now and one of our main expenses has been dealing with the amount of washing that a family of four can create!
We spend a lot of time outdoors – climbing trees, playing in parks, exploring and it has sometimes felt like it would be cheaper and easier to simply replace our clothes on a daily basis! The boys love digging in the dirt (we spent a lot of time fossicking in QLD – read more here for the best spots that we discovered) and we’ve stayed on a few farms – so you can imagine how grubby then can get.
Hubby manages to get by on the same outfit for a few days – washing his boxers in the shower with him and taking great pride when we hang out the laundry and he has just 2 shirts on the line compared to about 300 for the boys! He is extremely low maintenance. The boys, however, need only to glance at a bowl of spaghetti and their outfit is destroyed. They will easily go through 3 or 4 shirts a day – so it’s easy to end up with bags of dirty clothes lying around – and unlike in our house where I had a whole laundry room I could close the door on and ignore for a few days – living in a bus means we need to be a bit more organised and on top of things!
Laundry day at camp!
On our first month travelling we spent a whopping $120 on washing and drying our clothes. The average price for a load of washing was $4. In 6 months we only found one place that had free washers and dryers and on the other end of the scale one caravan park was charging $6 for a wash and $4 for 10 minutes dry time. Eeek!
A solution was needed, or one of us was going to have to get a job just to support our laundry habit! That’s when someone suggested the Scrubba Wash Bag to us. We had already looked at a few different portable washing machine options, but due to size, price and water usage requirements we hadn’t found any suitable, so we were really excited to discover the Scrubba is affordable and very easy to pack.
The Scrubba wash bag is the smallest portable travel washing machine for washing clothes anywhere, anytime, for free. It is incredibly light – weighing in at only 142g and foldable for super easy storage (it’s so petite that I’ve misplaced mine a few times already!) so it’s absolutely perfect for any type of travel.
The Scrubba is designed on the old fashioned washboard style of laundering – there is a corrugated lining inside the bag which literally scrubs the dirt off your clothes. All you need to do is throw in your dirty clothes, add some liquid laundry detergent, close up the bag, let out the air then rub the bag for about 3 minutes to scrub all the dirt away. Then you tip out the dirty water, add fresh water and rinse the clothes by sealing the bag again and shaking it. Then simply wring out the clean clothes and hang out to dry! It’s so quick and simple – and really does get your clothes clean and fresh again.
See our Scrubba bag in action on a recent trip to the beautiful Northern Rivers region of NSW below!
The thing I love the most about the Scrubba is being able to use it anywhere. It’s great after a day at the pool – we just throw all the swimmers inside to give them a quick wash without having to wait for a full load to be ready. It’s really simple to rinse the boys’ clothes through each day – meaning we don’t have lots of dirty washing hanging around the bus.
It’s so light that it is perfect for any kind of travel – overnight or long haul trips. It’s especially great for camping as it packs small, weighs hardly anything and is quick and simple to use.
It’s a definite winner for us – and we recommend it highly to any other travelling families on the road too! Grab your Scrubba Wash Bag on this link.
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