The Primordial Soap

We left home with a little plastic bottle of travel soap, like the general purpose kind they sell at REI. We ended up using it for everything: laundry, dishes, hand soap, shampoo.  Some of the more spartan Gites don't provide any soap (or towels or sheets for that matter).

We started to run out.  But buying a replacement was tougher than we thought.  In the part of France where the "big city" has less than 1000 residents, specialty items like tiny bottles of travel soap simply aren't.

Lugging around a family sized bottle was out of the question, as it would be much too heavy to carry 15 miles per day, and we couldn't bring ourselves to refill our little bottle and discard the rest.

Instead, we added a squirt of soap to our container when it was available: a little blue dish soap here, some lovely lavender bath soap there.  Today, in fact, our freshly laundered clothes have a not unpleasant coconut-lemon aroma.

Travel Soap