It’s not so hard really; depending on what assets are available in a place you’re travelling to, you’ll either visit a laundromat or ensure the accommodation you stay in has laundry machines.
Step one is to establish if laundromats are a thing where you’re visiting. If the are, grand, it’s going to be very straightforward. Usually a quick Google Maps review for a laundromat will reveal if there is one in the town you’re staying. Hint: use the word for that in the language of the place you’re staying: mosoda in Hungarian, laverie in French, prádelna in Czech. We’ll then choose an accommodation within easy walking of this. Another unexpected silver lining of this is how it generally results in having you stay in a neighborhood where the residents of the place you’re visiting actually live. It’s not so common to find them in tourist hotspots but it is pretty common to find them near the main train terminal. We bring laundry detergent sheets now, but some laundromats have machines pre-loaded with detergent so at time’s it’s unnecessary — that can be tricky for folks with allergies who need unscented/dye-free laundry detergent. Using this public amenity has led so some interesting interactions with local people.
Once in Belgium, we were in a big hurry with a dryer that seemingly didn’t work and a train reservation quickly encroaching on us. Standing there with heavy, wet laundry, and a three hour train ride in front of us, we must have looked on edge. A local helped us problem solve and didn’t even make fun of us, though she certainly would have been within her right to do so. The problem: the dryer took a different token than the washer. To our credit, there was not signage (not even in French), it was a you-just-have-to-know kind of thing.
In Serbia, after each wash, an attendant entered the laundromat and sanitized the drum of the washer and then offered us a coffee. It was 10 p.m. so we declined but we were shocked by that kind of care and hospitality in what many Americans would consider a slumming-it situation.
We’ve visited a few places where laundromats are uncommon (Croatia, Bosnia, Poland, and Bulgaria). It was actually when we visited Poland that we learned the hard way that not all countries have the self-service laundromat as a common concept. A stern but sympathetic shook her head “no” at us when we tried to drop off some delicates to her laundry shop. So we ended up buying a few more base-layer items and doing some hotel sink laundry to get by. After we knew to look out for this, we started renting an apartment (never from that site) for whichever day was going to be laundry day. Alternatively, choose a hostel that has laundry machines when available as renting apartments local families should be living in is ethically slippery.
Yet another option to get your laundry done while you’re traveling is to drop it off as a wash-n-fold. We’ve done this in Thailand and in Italy. Navigating this task in not-English is surprisingly easy and humbling. I made intense eye contact with a Genevese woman who raised her eyebrow and then nodded toward the clock. I wrote down “3 p.m./1500” on a slip of paper and she wrote down a price. We nodded at each other and I came back at the arranged time with the arranged monies and took my perfectly folded stack of clean clothing back to the rental car.
