Five years ago, I started making trips across Europe and Israel with just a backpack. Carrying just a few pieces of clothing has many advantages, but it also meant weekly trips to laundromats. I like doing laundry, but the laundromats turned out to be much more fun than I expected.
Other tourists from all over the world use laundromats in big cities so I met some very interesting people while resupplying myself with clean clothes. But COVID changed laundromats just as it changed so many other things. This current trip I am on is my fifth trip to Europe since July of last year.
Until last week, I did not see any tourists in laundromats from France to Poland. At the beginning of this trip, I washed clothes in Rome in an empty laundromat. But last Thursday, I went to a laundromat near the Pantheon and met three sisters traveling together in France. Actually, there are four sisters, one was off doing something else.
Amy, Lee and Jane are currently living in Chicago, DC and Detroit. We talked for a while about where they had already been--the Louvre, Versailles, and many other Paris destinations. The next day they were going on a tour of the Normandy coast. They have another week in Paris then back to America.
A few minutes before the laundry was dry, Jane's husband John joined us. He saw my armor tattoo. He had an uncle who was a tank commander in World War II.
Next week I am staying in a monastic guest house which has its own washer-dryer so I won't need a laundromat.
In the same laundromat in which I met Amy, Lee and Jane, I met a couple from Australia and a bike racer from California. That was in 2017. The story is here.
My favorite laundromat story was from 2019 in Jerusalem. That is here.
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