Motorcycle Camping Road Trip: Hygiene

This is a motorcycle road trip gear review, in installments, from my 23 days living on the road and off of my motorcycle. I keep a personal “motorcycle diaries”, cataloging “lessons learned” and “bring next time”. These are some of my notes. More gear review categories can be found here.

Hygiene

Consider:

  • 3 towels: dishes/food, face/body, miscellaneous like cleaning the bugs off of the helmet shield
  • Wipes
  • Tweezers for the ladies
  • Feminine products and preparedness

Three towels that are distinct so as not to confuse them worked well for me. One for dishes/food, one (high absorbent, small) for washing my face or drying off after showers, and one miscellaneous for dirtier things like cleaning the bugs off of the helmet shield.

Wipes. Wipes are something I see outdoorsy women use almost ubiquitously on shorter camping stints, but never see men use. Wipes are great when a shower is not available, and when it is deemed too cold or too inappropriate to use available water sources for a bath. The most creative shower set-up I have experienced was picking up of a six-pack in the last town, setting up camp by a water source, and as each of those bottles were drained, refilling them at the stream and lining them up by the campfire to heat while dinner cooked; then after dinner, there was hot water ready to for bathing.

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Empty beer bottles can be filled with stream water and heated by the campfire to provide a warm shower after dinner.

For the ladies, tweezers is one of those things that is easy to forget, and absence quickly realized. When people are just seeing your eyes and eyebrows in an encasing of helmet and bundle of bulky riding gear, it is nice to still feel feminine and attractive. Also, be prepared for the need of feminine products, and the potential of their being needed off-cycle. Some towns were so small, I almost could not find what I needed.

At the end of the day, hygiene does not need to be sacrificed during consecutive motorbike road trip camping. It is true that sometimes creativity is helpful. Everyone has their own level of tolerance, but if one has already decided to motorcycle and camp – a little dirt under the nails or elsewhere is just part of the experience.

See other gear review categories.

 

See the rest of the Motorcycle Diaries