Shower Talk

Get in there. You and me. Let's make it weird.*

*—I’m just kidding. Let’s not. Step away. I have my lawyer on speed dial.

(Pexels.com)

The other day, a friend and I were discussing her impending launch of life on the road. As you might imagine, I’m a huge proponent. Do it, I said. You won’t regret it, I said.

And then I smashed together words I hope I never have to arrange in this particular order again: Be sure to have a shower plan.

I was speaking from the standpoint of a guy who, for six weeks now, has been thankful to have a perfectly good in-unit shower. The first two campgrounds I stayed in here in Texas were beautiful and wooded and relaxing and…rustic. The accommodations outside my trailer were functional at best and sketchy at worst. Now, when I say “sketchy,” the context is that I’m a lifelong suburbanite who considers air conditioning a basic necessity and whose superpower is hiring people to do the things I don’t want to do. In other words, I’m a big pampered baby. In further words, the Oregon Trail people could tell me a thing or two about hardship and the quaintness of personal grooming. I say could because they can’t, because most of them didn’t live very long. There’s a lesson in that.

I’m kidding again, of course. Sort of.

---

The shower in my current rig, left, is plenty big for the likes of me. The shower in my previous rig, part of a wet bath, was a tighter fit but served its purpose. (I would move the dog food container out before I got in, FYI.)

My friend is planning to engage in vanlife, which is enormously popular right now. As I’ve said before, I do get most of the allure. A van can go a lot of places a travel trailer cannot. It probably goes a bit easier on gas, an increasingly worrisome factor. But I’ve always dismissed the idea, for me, with these words: I don’t want to have to work that hard for a shower.

I invite anyone, and especially my friend Chérie Newman, to contradict me on that assertion. Because I’m speaking from a place of ignorant certainty. Not usually my style.

The truth is, travelers have plenty of options for getting clean. There’s whatever you have in your rig; mine is spacious and functional but not at all like what I would have at home (a mere 45 psi on the water pressure, the better to preserve my RV plumbing, takes away any thoughts of luxuriating in the shower). There are truck stops and health clubs and, yes, even facilities in state parks and campgrounds. I have an outdoor shower port on my trailer, and I could, conceivably, set up a shower stall outside. But why? I have what I need indoors, which keeps everybody else safe from what they don’t need: my bare ass prancing around.

But I stand by what I said to my aspiring-vanlife friend. You don’t want to be without a way of getting clean.

---

An illustration of this principle: On May 30, I broke down camp near Lake Tawakoni, Texas, and prepped the trailer for a 100-plus mile trek to a new campground. It was a swampy morning, and I was drenched in sweat by the time I settled into the driver’s seat and got moving.

At the new campground, I set everything up again. The early-morning humidity was gone, but the midday bake had moved in. Again, I was a mess when the chores were through. In that moment, there was no greater candidate in North Texas for a shower, so I got to it.

At the campground facilities.

Which were lovely and clean, a vast departure from what I had encountered in the other two places.

I hadn’t planned on that.