My daughter is two and half and we have never traveled exclusively with cloth diapers before. We’ve spent the night at my parents house during a home renovation and used and combination of cloth and disposables for a short trip for a family funeral. But for longer stretches we’ve always employed disposables, though also always with a diaper cover because I didn’t trust them not to leak. I’ve always hated this because it is an added expense for travelling. Fortunately we don’t travel more than a couple times a year, so I found the expense to be tolerable, but annoying. But in my heart, I wanted to use my cloth diapers, and buying disposables seemed like a waste.
First major barrier to using cloth was having a large enough stash. Even if I washed the night before we left I wasn’t always confident that we wouldn’t run out of diapers, especially when my daughter was small.
Second problem, my husband didn’t want to haul our whole diaper pail and we didn’t have a large enough wet bag that would hold in the smell of three or four days’ worth of diapers.
Third, I wasn’t sure if our diapers could go that long without washing.
But now that my daughter is partially potty trained and we decided to take the risk. I also finally decided to invest in a large enough wet bag, purchasing the size Large Bummis Fabulous Wet Bag which I’d had my eye on for quite sometime. Honestly, I wish I had bought it sooner. Yes, it was a larger upfront expense, but it would have paid for itself on what we would have saved not buying disposables for travel. I figured if it was a disaster we could run out and get some disposables. This year, for the first time, we also stayed in a hotel while visiting my husband’s family instead of in his mother’s home. This made me feel even better as we could leave the large wet bag in the bathroom at the hotel in case it didn’t hold in smells as well as we hoped. We packed diapers for nighttime and diapers for the car, using waterproof training pants during the day.
The whole experience was a surprising success. The only problem I had was making sure I had enough nighttime diapers for the trip, since I only have three nighttime diapers that work really well. My daughter actually did surprisingly well. The double stuffed pocket diaper she wore in the car was damp but not soaked, and we stopped three or four times to use the bathroom while en route, most of the time at her request. We went out to lunch and had a family dinner on Saturday followed by an all day Christmas party on Sunday. She didn’t have one accident. Now perhaps my good luck traveling with cloth was related to her wonderful potty training progress. But it still pleased me not to purchase disposables. Hopefully I can try the same technique next year with our new baby.
Did you find ways to cloth diaper when in the past you would have bought disposables? Share your experience.
