By: Blonde Two
There are no two ways about it, when you are out walking, your clothes can get pretty stinky. We Blondes should know because although we always smell of rose petals, our youngsters don’t! We are very gentle with them about this, and once in a while we even offer to wash clothes for them.
Look at this equation:
Four days expedition + one overfull rucksack = not really enough pairs of undies/socks
Which is why we got in touch with the lovely people at Scrubba (they are from Australia) and asked if we could review their very clever sounding Scrubba Wash Bag. Weighing only 142g and being small enough to fit into a pocket, the Scrubba has been dubbed, “The world’s smallest washing machine”. I am not going to tell you how it works yet, but you can read for yourself here.
Our very own Scrubba arrived in the post this week and although I am very excited to try it out (I am one of those weird people who actually likes hand-washing clothes), we Blondes are saving it for a real field test with this year’s Gold Expedition team who will be sweating their way across Exmoor in July.
We will let you know how we get on … if it is bad news, you might be able to smell us!
Washing clothes!.. what is this strange idea.? Four weeks in the Picos De Europa with 25 teenagers and not a packet of Daz in sight! ( I wondered why no one would talk to me ..)
25 smelly teenagers, you deserve a medal!!
Good grief! What is wrong with a bar of soap and a tarn/stream/more-or-less unmuddy puddle? The only real problem is drying washed items on wet days – and the only real solution is to hug them at night – or give them to the dog to hug.
Well we will let you know when we try it out. Maybe a bar-of-soap, Scrubba race is in order!
What’s wrong with using a drybag – the one you probably already have in your pack? I once soaked my clothes in meths when a fuel bottle split in my pack – back of shirt, trousers and worn underwear got contaminated, plus a fleece and some other non-drybagged stuff in the pack. Solution was to put the harmed garments in a drybag, add all the multi-purpose soap gel I had, half-fill bag with water (some heated), and then punch the living daylights out of it for ten minutes. Good thing about this is that, unlike washing clothes in the stream, I could do the washing then discard the contaminated water away from the stream I sourced the fresh stuff from, so no water pollution by a meths/soap combo. Same with rinsing water. Drying was a greater challenge than washing. Since then I’ve always wondered why no “outdoors advice, tips’n’hints” webpage has suggested that hiking poles and the ubiquitous “length of paracord” can be used to make a washing-line – vital knowledge on a Dartmoor sparse of trees to string one between! Maybe this neglect proves the Poms really aren’t keen on washing, as our Antipodean cousins often suggest… We, The Great Unwashed, therefore suggest you return your test findings of their washing product to these critical grandsons of deported convicts in order to prove to them that we are squeaky-clean after all… Keep up the good work.
Well we will give the ‘Scrubba’ a jolly good test soon. Maybe we will try a normal dry bag as well (but it won’t have special knobbly bits!)