As you saw in our last post, we had quite the laundry saga so our day to explore Tucson became the day to retrieve laundry and let the girls play.
Justin ended up leaving around 7:30am to fix his mistake. Justin and I contemplated having the girls and I dropped off downtown to explore while Justin got the laundry, but because the drive to the laundromat was 5 hours round trip with no traffic we decided against it. And boy, I’m so glad we did!
The girls and I took advantage of the day by packing it full of baking, crafting and playing. The girls spent the morning climbing Buttercup (the tree they named last time we were at this spot) while I prepped the day’s activities.
Climbing “Buttercup” 
We started the morning off with a “snow” ball fight in Wobbles. It was a blast! We each had two giant tinsled puff balls to throw at each other. We giggled so much! And we didn’t even get wet or cold. :).
Next, our littlest and I baked two giant peanut butter cookies which turned out pretty good. Peanut butter cookies aren’t my favorite but we knew Daddy would like them.
While we were baking Kira was up in Buttercup playing mountain lion. And apparently in order to play a mountain lion properly you have to cover your face with black coal from the fire!
The girls ate a quick snack before embarking on a rescue mission to get our littlest’s favorite stuffed animal down from Buttercup. Our oldest informed me, “we have to practice rescuing things like stuffed animals so that when there is a real animal trapped that needs our help, we’ll know how to do it.” Seems logical.
I then painted the girls feet and hands to make prints which we turned into cardinals and snow people. The girls had so much fun painting for about an hour on the beautiful sunny day under the dappled light of Buttercup. We also made time to make special wands and owl ornaments made partly from our craft supplies and partly from our sweet Buttercup’s old branches. These will become Christmas gifts for friends and family.
Toward the evening our youngest created a store inside Wobbles that sold everything for a dollar. This was even better than the Dollar Store, people! The store clerk, who went by the name of Rosie Revere, was chipper as can be. Crafting makes these ladies very happy!!
Well, evening rolled around and by 4:30pm Justin had returned with our freshly washed and dried lost laundry!! Hurray!! It was all there!! What an amazing couple that ran that laundromat to go above and beyond for us. We were so glad to have our things back!
I’d call it a successful day with the girls and I having a great time creating holiday cheer and Justin getting some time to himself and getting our clothing back.
Hi! Enjoy your blog. Curious about how you manage water with a family of 4 when you are boondocking. Do you bring extra water, or do you just make the capacities of your fresh water tank (and gray and black water tanks) work somehow?
Hi Patricia— our tanks are definitely on the small side for 4 people, with 24 gal fresh, 21 gal grey and 18 gal black. We carry 3 7-gallon water containers in the van that we fill if we know we’ll be boondocking for a while, and use a siphon to re-fill the Airstream’s tank from the jugs. So all together we have 45 gallons fresh water. We usually don’t use the shower until near the end of our stay when we’re sure we have enough tank capacity.. until then we wash our hair in the kitchen sink or dump some hot water from a kettle into the bathroom sink with some soap for a wash-cloth bath :). For washing dishes, we dump a small amount of hot water (again from a kettle so we don’t waste water while waiting for it to make its way from the hot water heater) into a bowl with some dish soap, wash all the dishes with that and rinse using a very slow trickle from the sink. If we’re somewhere where it’s acceptable to dump grey water on the ground then we might dump a few gallons in order to make room for an extra shower (and that’s when the extra water in the 7-gal jugs comes in handy). The black tank tends to be our absolute limit, which lasts us max 7 days if we’re only going to the bathroom in the camper… but could last longer if we have daytime excursions where we’re using the facilities elsewhere.. I had considered options for dumping the blank tank (like a mascerating pump) but we’re usually more than ready to move on after 7 days anyways.