["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published May 17, 2012] © 2012
With the summer travel season upon us, a person’s
thoughts just naturally turn to…underwear.
My many friends who travel a lot have been lamenting
for some time that they just can’t seem to resolve the underwear problem,
especially if they’re going to be staying at a different place every
night. You wash out your dainties but
depending on the climate, they never quite dry before you have to pack them up
and move on. My friend Gina says she
toured Scotland and Ireland for seventeen days with a plastic baggie of clean
but soggy unmentionables that were never truly dry until she got home and put
them in her dryer.
The nightly washing ritual has a number of other
downsides, not the least of which is having one’s undies draped all over one’s
hotel bath, particularly if you’re staying in the $1,000 a night Scottish
castle-cum-golf resort. It just looks
so, well, low class. And might explain
why those Scots don’t wear anything under their kilts. They could just never get it to dry in that
damp climate either.
The main issue, of course, is that underwear just
takes up so much room in your suitcase.
Room you’d rather have for souvenirs.
So several of my friends, including Gina, have been test driving other
solutions including disposable underwear specifically meant for traveling. Wear it once and toss it.
Apparently, it is much more comfortable than one might
imagine for cheap underwear, and thus begs the question as to why one would
ever buy expensive underwear if the cheap disposable stuff is just as
comfy. But ours is not to reason
why. Another friend says that she has
tried saving up all her old ratty underwear to bring with her to just throw
away each night. Yet another says she
hits up the Dollar Store and buys a three-pack for $1.00.
But here’s the problem: while the plan is excellent, the execution
has turned out to be less so. At the
moment of truth, they can’t quite bear to throw perfectly good underwear
away. Or even serviceable if
elastically-challenged lingerie. It just
seems so wasteful.
The
ratty underwear solution is even more problematic. You’ve left a nice tip for the maid at the
pricey French chateau so do you really want her to find your shabby dainties in
the trash? One can almost hear her
mumbling under her breath, Merci, mais il vaut mieux peut-etre que vous gardiez votre
argent pour vous offrir du linge moins fatigués. (“Thanks, but maybe
you should keep the money and buy yourself some new underwear.”) The French can be so sarcastic.
On
a more fundamental basis, wearing ratty underwear also goes against everything
that is holey, er holy. Didn’t your mother always exhort you to wear good underwear in
case you were in an accident? Do you
really want to end up in the Cap Ferrat Urgent Care in tattered u-trou?
Yet
another friend says she is planning to solve the problem by buying the
super-lightweight travel underwear that is guaranteed to dry within hours even
in Indian monsoons. The problem is, it
is seriously expensive: $20-$30 a pair,
with men’s T-shirts running nearly $40.
Of course, if it truly dries that fast, you wouldn’t need very many
pairs. But if that monsoon thing was a
bit of advertising hyperbole, you could be spending your trip feeling like a
human terrarium.
Stories of depending on a hotel laundry service are
legion and usually involve sagas of a three week trip with one’s clean
underwear doggedly following two days behind.
My husband, who travels a lot on business, knows well the perils of
depending on a hotel laundry, especially in out-of-the-way places. Olof tells the story of traveling to
Indonesia and after a certain period of time, needing to get his laundry
done. His underwear had obviously enjoyed
the pampered life of a U.S. washing machine but when he got it back from his
Yogyakarta hotel, it was clear that it had undergone a far more vigorous manner
of washing. Best case, it had been
beaten with rocks. More likely, it had
been subjected to a local cleansing method involving stampeding water
buffalo. Suffice to say, it was full of
holes. On the rest of his travels in
Asia, he didn’t dare send his underwear out again, not only out of the sheer
embarrassment that a “rich American” would have such shredded skivvies, but his
wholehearted conviction that it would never survive a second experience.
Weighing all the options, there’s really only one
obvious conclusion. If you really want
to travel light, you’re just going to have to go commando.
No comments:
Post a Comment