Caravan Laundry Tips: How to Do Washing on the Road
Day five. The kids have worn the same shorts three times, everything smells faintly of campfire, and there's a bag of wet togs in the boot that you're actively choosing not to think about.
Every camping mum hits this wall. And the annoying part is that laundry on the road isn't hard — it's just fiddly. Wash it where? Dry it how? What do you do when the park laundry has one machine and a queue of eleven caravans?
Here's how we actually handle it, based on what's worked across a lot of trips and a lot of very smelly children.
The short version
- Wash small and often — a 15-minute rinse every second day beats a two-hour meltdown on day seven.
- Drying is the real bottleneck, not washing. Sort your line before you sort your detergent.
- Pack quick-dry fabrics so a load can go up in the morning and be dry by lunch.
- Ditch pegs. They blow away, they snap, and you will never have the right number of them.
How do you actually wash clothes in a caravan?
There are three realistic options, and most of us end up using all three across a single trip.
1. The park laundry
Easiest when it's available. The trick is timing — go at 7am or after dinner, not at 10am when every other family has had the same idea. Take your own detergent (park vending machines are pricey), and take a book, because leaving a load unattended in a busy park is how you end up with your undies in a pile on the bench.
Bring coins. Genuinely. A surprising number of parks still run coin-operated machines and there's no ATM for 80km.
2. Bucket washing (the underrated one)
A 20-litre bucket with a lid doubles as a washing machine and a storage tub. Half fill it, add a capful of laundry liquid, chuck the clothes in, put the lid on and let the drive to the next town agitate it for you. Rinse when you arrive.
It sounds like something from 1953. It works ridiculously well for kids' clothes, and it costs nothing.
3. Wash-as-you-go in the shower
Togs, undies and socks get rinsed the moment you're in the shower with them. Takes 30 seconds, saves you a whole category of washing later. If the shower block is the part of camping you dread, our mums have some strong opinions in Real Mum Hacks for Surviving the Shower Block.
Drying is the part that actually breaks people
You can wash anywhere. Drying is where caravan laundry falls apart — especially with pegs.
Here's what happens. You string up a line between the awning and a tree. The wind picks up. Half the pegs give way, a school jumper lands in the dirt, and you spend ten minutes on your knees under the van looking for pegs that have rolled into the grass. Then you do it all again tomorrow.
This is exactly why we brought in the Slide n' Dry Pegless Clothesline. You slide each item into a slot instead of pegging it — nothing to lose, nothing to blow away, and it holds up to 40kg, so wet towels and jeans are fine. It's twelve clickable slides, so you can run the full two metres between two trees or shorten it right down for a squeezy site at a packed holiday park.
It's Australian made and the slides are UV-stabilised, which matters more than it sounds. Cheap elastic lines go brittle and lose their stretch after a season up north, and then your washing just slides into a wet clump in the middle of the line.
Where to hang it
Awning arms are the obvious one. But also: between the van and a roof-rack pole, across the back of the ute canopy, tree to tree, or across the annexe when it's raining. Get it into the sun and the wind if you can — shade doubles your drying time.
Pack so there's less washing to do
The single biggest lever isn't how you wash. It's what you packed.
Cotton tees are the enemy of caravan laundry. They soak up water, take forever to dry, and hold smells. Quick-dry synthetics and technical fabrics wash in a bucket and dry on the line in a couple of hours.
This is a large part of why our family lives in UPF50+ fishing shirts on the road. They're lightweight, they dry fast, they don't hold sweat the way cotton does, and they mean the kids can be outside all day without the sunscreen battle. The Ladies Reef Shirt is the one I pull on over togs at the beach and then wear to the shops afterwards, which is one less outfit in the wash pile.
Same logic with towels. A regular beach towel takes a full day to dry and comes back into the van damp and sandy. Our sand-free towels shake clean and dry in a fraction of the time, so they're not sitting on the line taking up the space your actual clothes need.
If you're still on the fence about sun-safe clothing generally, Why I Ditched Sunscreen for Good explains how we got here.
Our wash-day routine at camp
- Morning. Sort the pile while the kettle boils. Anything that just needs freshening goes in the bucket with a capful of liquid.
- Set the line first. Clip the slides together, hook the bungees on, done in under a minute. Do it before you wash, not after.
- Rinse and wring. Wring harder than feels necessary — every extra squeeze is 20 minutes off your drying time.
- Slide it up. Heavy items in the middle, small stuff on the ends.
- Flip at lunch. Turn the thick items (jeans, hoodies) so the damp side faces the sun.
- Pack down before dusk. Anything left out after dark picks up dew and you're back to square one.
What's actually worked for us
- One mesh bag per kid. Dirty stuff goes straight in. No sorting, no mystery piles under the bunk.
- Concentrated laundry liquid in a small squeeze bottle. A full box of powder is dead weight and it goes rock hard the second it gets damp.
- Wash on arrival day, not departure day. You've got a whole afternoon of sun and you're not racing a hitch-up.
- Two of everything, not five. Wash more often, carry less. Your van storage will thank you.
- Keep the line permanently in the van. The pegless one lives in its zip-lock bag in the camp kitchen tub, so it never gets left at home.
Caravan laundry questions we get asked
How often should you do washing when caravanning?
Every two to three days for a family. It's counter-intuitive, but small frequent loads are far less work than one enormous one, and you can dry a small load on a single line in an afternoon.
What's the best clothesline for a caravan?
A pegless one that packs down small and adjusts in length. Pegs are the failure point in wind, and a fixed-length line is useless on a tight site. We use the Slide n' Dry pegless clothesline because it does both, holds 40kg, and the UV-stabilised slides survive an Aussie summer.
Can you dry washing inside a caravan?
You can, but go carefully — wet washing inside a closed van creates condensation and, over a few days, mould. If you have to, run a line through the annexe instead, crack a window and a roof vent, and get it outside first thing in the morning.
How do you dry clothes when it's raining?
Under the awning with both ends of the line pulled up high, or inside the annexe. Wring hard, space items further apart than you think you need to, and accept that thick cotton simply will not dry. This is where quick-dry fabrics earn their keep.
Do you need special detergent for camping?
Not really, but choose a low-suds, biodegradable liquid if you're washing anywhere the greywater goes onto the ground. It's better for the site and it rinses out far more easily when you're working with a bucket.
The point of all this
Nobody goes camping to do laundry. The whole reason to sort out a system is so that washing takes twenty minutes on a Tuesday morning instead of hijacking a whole afternoon you could have spent at the creek.
Get the line sorted, pack fabrics that dry fast, and wash little and often. That's genuinely the whole thing.
And while you're setting the van up properly — the Map of Australia caravan sticker is the other thing worth adding. The kids mark off every town as you reach it, which buys you a surprising amount of peace on the drive between laundry days.
Come and swap hacks with 30,000 other camping mums in our Facebook community — the washing threads get genuinely heated.
Written by Prue | Founder, Mums Who Caravan and Camp
Prue is a camping mum, community builder, and the founder of MWCAC — Australia's go-to brand for sun-safe UPF50+ clothing for families who love the outdoors. She has done more bucket washing at more caravan parks than she'd care to count, and started MWCAC after realising there had to be a better way to get kids outside all day without the sunscreen battle. Today, MWCAC is trusted by over 30,000 Australian camping mums.
Victoria, Australia | mumswhocaravanandcamp.com.au | Facebook Community