Sunday, July 11, 2010

What would you pay for a shower?

The economic value of a shower is all over the place in America.

When we started this trip, I scoffed at paying for a shower. How dare someone charge me for streaming water! 

Needless to say, you go on oooooone long dusty hike and you'd crawl through Hell and high water to so much as locate a shower...forget what you have to pay for it.

Prices around town (and by town I mean the United States):

$4 for 8 minutes - Arizona campground. I chose to "shower" in the Pleasure Way when I saw these prices. I thought restricting you to 8 minutes was absurd. This was early on in the trip...

$2 for 8 minutes - Grand Canyon. Only a few days later, we came upon this steal after our humungo hike and ran to the bathrooms to make it in before closing. Oh how 8 minutes can start to look like a lifetime when you're dirty.

$5 for unlimited minutes - basically the going rate everywhere else. We've paid this at an RV park that we weren't staying at, and at Yosemite (which included a free towel and body wash and shampoo, woo hoo). 

FREE! Those four magic letters meant nothing to me three weeks ago and now they completely change my way of looking at a potential overnight spot. If you recall our very first campsite was at a New Mexico state park, and they had free showers. I had no idea how awesome that was. Most state or national forest campgrounds don't even have showers. Nowadays, the only place we can get a "free" shower (aside from a house or hotel) is at an RV park that we've paid to be in overnight.*

So the question is...what would YOU pay for a shower?



*As a sidenote, RV parks are growing on my list of places to spend the night. They usually charge $30-40 per night, which I first thought was crazy, but now I can put an actual pricetag on the different things you get there: shower, dump station, WI-FI (we will drive all over town looking for solid wi-fi). These places are starting to look like the Four Seasons.


2 comments:

  1. 1. I love reading your blog
    2. I love your photos. What treasures you've found.
    3. I think I would pay $2 for 8 minutes if it wasn't freezing.
    4. I miss you more than words.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You should start under-cutting the competition and begin charging only $2 to dump a bucket of water over the heads of your fellow campers!

    ReplyDelete