We took a short trip to South Texas this weekend to see family, and stayed in a hotel. When I started to pack our backup disposable diapers, I realized we’d have to have 2 bags of ‘sposies – one size for each kid. When I go places with the kids during the week, it’s so easy because I just bring a few BumGenius One-Size diapers and adjust the size to whichever child needs them.
I decided it would be easier to pack 15 BumGenius diapers than to pack all those disposables, and I wouldn’t have to worry about throwing away all those diapers. The hotel web site said it had laundry facilities, so I just packed my Rockin’ Green Remix soap and we should be good to go.
When the only clean diapers left were the ones on the kids’ bottoms and it was naptime, I took my stash to the hotel’s laundry room. It turns out that the machines were coin-operated old-school top loaders, and there was no rinse cycle. Also no hot water wash – only “warm”.
I decided to go ahead and try it.
By the time we pulled them out of the dryer (we don’t normally machine-dry, but this was just for time’s sake) – the whole stash smelled like poo!
We ended up having to re-wash the diapers at my sister-in-law’s house after naps and put the kids in the only disposables we brought. Fortunately, she uses cloth diapers too, so she knew exactly what cycles to use with her machine and even had some Charlie’s Soap for us to use.
Moral of the story: probably not a great idea to rely on hotel laundry facilities when traveling with cloth diapers.
I was considering using cloth when I take Little Lady to BlogHer in San Diego on Thursday, but the reality is that even if the laundry facilities at the Marriott are awesome and free, there are 3,000+ other bloggers staying there and I think it would be a little unrealistic to assume there would be a free machine at exactly the time I would need it. I don’t have any prefolds-with-covers that fit her anymore, and it’s just not in the budget to purchase a bunch right now.
My compromise for BlogHer this week is going to be gDiapers. We’ve used them in the past and they are particularly usable for younger babies who don’t poop a lot. The flushable inserts take up less room than the equivalent package of disposable diapers, and I can still re-use the cloth covers.
Where in South Texas? I am in the Rio Grande Valley. We just came back from vacation and I used the Grovia shells with their disposable liners for dd in the car and overnight. They worked great. If the shell got wet/stinky from pee, I’d wash it with a little RnG in the hotel sink and we were good to go!