Lice, Laundromats, and Losing My Mind

Just so you’re up to speed, my name’s Alia, and this is my secret travel journal. I’m a 20-something American girl living in my self-converted shuttle bus. This is where I share it all—the hilariously embarrassing truth about my adventures. Today it’s Lice, Laundromats, and Losing My Mind: A Vanlife Misadventure. That’s really all you need to know. Now, go on, step inside… Welcome to the mayhem.

The Creepy Crawly Cherry On Top

Before we begin, let’s do a quick tally of all the things that had gone wrong in the weeks prior, shall we?

I had a composting toilet mishap, almost flew off a cliff with faulty brakes, and the bus was leaking every fluid imaginable. Then, I got cat-called twice, dropped $1500 on repairs, and now, to top it all off… I. Had. Lice.

I had no idea how I got it. All I knew was that I could feel them crawling in between my hair follicles like little parasitic jungle explorers, planting their hatchlings and sucking my scalp blood.

In two days I had a friend arriving to stay in the bus with me for a week. That meant I had exactly one day to kill all the lice currently on my head, in my bed, and anywhere else they may be lurking.

I had to be swift and efficient – two adjectives I had never used to describe my vanlife experience.

It was time to get to work.

Mission Acquired

I skidded into the laundromat parking lot at 10am on a mission. I sat behind the steering wheel and tied my hair up in a tight knot, like I was trying to shut the lice up before we went out in public together.

Sit still and be quiet, I snapped at them.

I had to park in the back of the lot because it was crowded and that was the only place the bus would fit. I looked over my shoulder into the bus and sighed. Lugging all my shit back and forth across this parking lot was going to be as equally hard as it was embarrassing.

The Laundromat Dramatics

It took five trips to haul all my clothes, bedding, and curtains into the laundromat, dropping socks across the lot as I went. I got everything into three extra large washing machines and went to swipe in my credit card.

Error.

I tried again. Error. I tried a different washing machine. Error.

My first thought was Dear freaking God, what is wrong with my card? Did I max it out after all the bus repairs? Did someone steal my info and max it out? SOMETHING MUST BE MAXED.

(I must warn you now, Anxiety had taken the wheel that day and I jumped to the worst possible conclusion every chance I got. I had one single working brain cell in my head – let’s call her Sandy, because that’s how big she was, the size of a grain of sand – and she had a flare for drama.)

Suddenly a woman spoke up at a table nearby. She was rocking a baby in a stroller and looking at me like I was the dumbest girl in school. “You have to get a laundry card,” she said to the beat of duh.

“Oh, right, thanks,” I laughed, because I laugh through every stupid moment of my life.

The Machine

I walked over to the very obvious-looking machine to get a laundry card and loaded money onto it with my very non-maxed out card.

The machine was not a happy one. Every time I came to the end of the laundry card creation process it would glitch and start over. After, I kid-you-not, trying seven times to get this card, it finally spat it out at me.

Between loads I went back to the bus, sweaty and itchy, to wipe every surface down with vinegar and cleaning solution. If you want a real visual for how that looked, just picture a girl on her hands a knees scrubbing the floor with paper towels (the rags were in the wash), outwardly cursing her scalp-y comrades, trying to plug her nose from the vinegary stench… That’s all you get.

Once my timer went off signaling the wash cycle was finished, I headed back inside. I smelled like a bucket of bleach.

I was able to fit all my wet belongings into two giant washing machines. WIN!

Then I realized my laundry card was 20 cents short. FUCK.

After wrestling with the darkly possessed card machine again, I finally got to the end of the process without a glitch and it hit me with “must load five dollars minimum.” GOD, FINE, TAKE MY MONEY.

Honestly, it’s not a big deal. Right? Losing $4.80 for a laundry card I will never use again is not a big deal. And yet, something primal in me wanted to punch a hole through that machine. If that duh-toned lady wasn’t still sitting there watching me, I might have tried.

All I could do was take the L and walk it off. Swallowing back the fire in my throat, I started the drying cycle and kept on trudging. I knew we (my lice monsters and I) were only half way through this process. I still had to kill the damn things, I couldn’t fly off the rails quite yet.

Swift and Efficient are Made of Metal

After everything had dried, or mostly dried (I was ready to get the freak out of there) I started prepping to leave.

The thought of lugging five loads worth of stuff back across the parking lot made me cringe. If only I could hack the system just a bit… What happened to being swift and efficient?

I glanced over to some empty laundry carts nearby. A sneaky smirk grew on my face.

I’ll call you Swift, and you Efficient, I addressed the two carts silently, snatching them giddily and pulling them over to my drying machines. All I had to do was fit everything inside the carts and roll them out to my bus – one trip, slick as fuck.

So, I piled everything into my new metal, rolling henchmen until each cart looked like an over-loaded Chipotle bowl.

Then, high off the feeling of finally catching a break, I sped towards the doors, guns-a-blazin’ into freedom, both carts skidding on the linoleum floor behind me.

WACK.

By All The Stars and Lizzo Above, Let Me Leave

I jolted backwards, my shoulders popping at the sudden hard stop. Clothes went flying, tumbling onto the floor like a citrus-smelling avalanche. I looked around, absolutely bewildered. What just happened?

I tugged on the carts again, this time actually looking at them, and realized the problem. My cheeks burned a fiery red as my eyes followed the metal handles of the carts up towards the ceiling where they were caught in the doorway.

The carts were perfectly designed so that people couldn’t steal them or take them out of the room.

Right.

It took everything in me not to curl up in my fallen laundry and surrender myself to sweet, sweet death.

No More Miss Nice Lice

At that moment, I noticed one of the workers looking at me, and then some other bystanders too. It was clear now everyone in the room thought I was the dumbest girl in school. I didn’t even dare look at the mother from earlier, I could already feel her DUH burning a hole through the back of my head. Maybe her stare would kill some lice for me.

Screw this, I thought, and threw all my laundry back into Swift and Efficient. Shoving them out of the way, I stormed from the building, laundry-less. I stomped across the parking lot, got into the bus and slammed the door behind me. Ignoring all other cars in the parking lot, I drove right up to the front of the laundromat and parked partly in a handicapped spot, and partly in a striped no-parking zone.

I didn’t care! Niceties were out the window – as far gone as I was about to be when I zoomed away from this entire situation and tried to forget it ever happened.

Striding back inside, I dug my arms into Swift and bear hugged a pile of my laundry then spun on my heel and strode back out to the bus. I flung everything through the back door, frisbee-style, letting it scatter on the bus floor like confetti. I made several trips, never looking anyone in the eye. Then, with a final “humph,” I got into the driver’s seat, revved the bus to life, and hit the gas hard.

She didn’t move.

My Bus Child Doing What She Does Best

No no no no no no, not now, please, no, not now.

I begged her, pleading with her like she was a small child throwing a fit in a grocery store. Babe, I love you, please don’t do this here!

She didn’t budge. I could feel eyes staring at me through the window of the laundromat.

How could this happen? I just drove her, literally minutes ago. I jumped out of the bus with the kind of energy you get when you are at your frustration limit. I grabbed a bottle of oil and popped the hood. Checking the oil was really the only thing I knew how to do when it came to trouble-shooting bus failures.

She was a little low, so I topped her off. Although, I didn’t see how that could stop her from moving forward when I tried to accelerate.

I got back in the bus and tried again. Nothing – not even an inch forward.

By some lightning-strike epiphany, I decided to throw her in reverse and back up a foot. Then I threw her back into Drive and slowly hit the pedal. Something inside her clicked, and we were off. I couldn’t explain what just happened, but I didn’t dare question it.

Thanking her and every star above, I sped towards my next destination. I was now crunched for time – it was 3pm and I didn’t like doing my killing at night.

Walmart

I walked into the building slowly, studying the faces around me. Did they know? Could they take one look at me and see I was infected?

For some reason, this felt more high-stakes than walking around the laundromat. There were a lot of people here. I felt like I had a hidden zombie bite, and if the public found out, they’d put me down to protect the masses. But I had no choice, I had to be there to find a cure.

Cringing internally, I asked a worker where I could find some lice treatment. To my disbelief, she didn’t immediately shrink away from me, gag, or shriek out a warning to the entire building. She simply led me to the correct isle and left me to my murder plotting.

I chose something called, “Super Lice Killing Mousse” that could suffocate the crawlers while also poisoning their seedy babies in under three hours. I also got some fast acting lice-killing shampoo, partly to be thorough, and partly as a petty, little f-you to the demons. What? They were literally eating me!

I checked out, avoiding eye contact with the cashier, and hurried back to the bus. There was a camp spot about 40 minutes outside the city of Tucson, Arizona where I’d been sleeping. It was a wide-open desert-y pasture where random cows roamed and other vanlifers dispersed. It had the kind of mountain view that was so beautiful, I literally cried the night before over the sunset.

That’s where I headed, the magical mountain paradise to murder my scalp bugs in peace.

The Not-So-Elegant Act of Murder

By the time I parked in my camp spot, it was around 4pm. All of my freshly-washed belongings scattered the floor and I haphazardly pressed them against the back door to give me some space. I didn’t want to touch them until all the lice had been taken care of.

Dividing my hair into 3 sections, I clipped it in tight buns, one on the top of my head and one over each ear. I felt like a buggy-haired, knock-off Queen Amidala. Then, I lathered the “Super Lice Killing Mousse” into each hair section and let it sit for a while. I spent the next couple hours using a tiny comb to sift through my roots and drag out the corpsy, dead eggs.

This was not a methodical, soothing process. This was hectic and messy, there was mousse and hair all over the kitchen sink, and I – well, I was straight delirious at that point. Everything was hilarious in a “what the fuck is my life right now?” kind of way and I could not stop laughing. Between my spurts of hysteria and egg sifting, I noticed something move just outside the bus window.

Every muscle in my body froze.

The “Losing My Mind” part of “Lice, Laundromats, and Losing My Mind”

I was a concrete statue in the middle of my home, eyes wide on the outside world (I had forgotten it existed and was completely taken off guard when it announced itself now.) Being loopy and delirious was one thing, but adding paranoia to that kind of mental state is… dangerous.

The very first thought that invaded my head, I kid you not, was, “the rattlesnakes. They’ve found me!”

A few days prior at the Desert Museum, I’d learned rattlesnakes were the most populated snake in Arizona. Also, when I first got to this campsite, I noticed there were dozens of fist-sized holes glittering the shrubs around me. I had reassured myself that I had not, in fact, parked my home in the middle of a hundred poisonous reptiles, because duh, snakes don’t live in herds.

But now, brain freshly frenzied by the day (and the lice!), I was absolutely, one hundred percent, no doubt in my mind, SWAT-team style surrounded by flesh-eating rattlesnakes.

You know what’s even crazier? Delirious me ignored them. I knew they were out there, circling me like sharks ‘cause that’s totally the way snakes behave, and I straight-up decided they were out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

I had a job to do and I wasn’t done yet. So if the snakes wanted me, they’d have to come pry my lice-infected self out of this bus themselves.

Plus, what was I going to do about it really? Leave? There was no time to find another camp spot, the sun was just about set. Should I go out there and investigate? I pictured myself tiptoeing amongst the dirt holes, hair still greasy and sticking every which-way like a Whoville character, towel tied around my neck like a cape, and machete in hand.

No, I did neither of those things. I simply shoved my head in the kitchen sink and started rinsing.

Honestly, the snakes would probably sense the crazy on me and deem me too damaged to eat.

The Flood

My neck was aching from all the egg-extracting, and I was not being careful whatsoever. I used the sink sprayer, washing the back of my head manically. My eyes squeezed shut as the water flowed down my face, and I scrubbed with both elbows high in the air. I wasn’t paying any attention to where the water was landing.

Eventually I came up to breath, drying my face with a paper towel and opening my eyes. I froze again, realizing what I had done.

There was water all over the floor. By some miracle, the water hadn’t reached my pile of laundry, but a couple more minutes, it very well could have.

I untied my cape and slapped it on the floor, soaking up the semi-flood. As I knelt, reaching and wiping like a half naked mental-asylum Cinderella (I had pants at some point?), it dawned on me: If I didn’t want to flood the bus, I’d have to use the outdoor shower, which meant I’d have to go outside… to the snakes.

(Just be more careful with the water, you say? HA, please, are you reading this right? I was DELULU any way you slice it.)

Officially Mortified

Next thing you know, I’m out in the Arizona air, scrubbing my head while hunched over sideways. My hair was soaking and half lathered in lice-murdering shampoo, and my eyes were hysterically wide, trained on the hundreds of devil-shaped snake holes scattered around me. The towel cape was back around my neck, and I was gripping the shower head like I was ready to bring it down on a lunging snake head. Oh, and I was in my underwear.

Suddenly I heard a van coming up the dirt road. There were no trees, nothing to hide behind, just a clear view of me looking like that.

I stopped scrubbing and stilled like I was playing a poorly executed game of hide and seek. The van slowed as it passed, and all I could see were two bewildered faces, lit up by the golden hour sunset, gaping through the driver’s side window.

It was official. I was mortified. Out of everything that had happened that day, that was the worst.

Suddenly, I heard movement in the shrubs behind me, and I swung around, flinging my arm up in preparation to slice a snake up. I’m pretty sure I shrieked in a wild battle cry, but I can’t be certain.

What I met was not a deadly rattlesnake, but a tiny mouse-like creature scurrying into one of the holes. It had a long tail with a tuff of hair at the end and long skinny feet like it was on skis. A kangaroo rat.

Huffing and puffing, I slowly put down the shower head.

The Stupidest Part Of The Whole Story, If You Can Believe It

I finished rinsing my hair and got back in the bus. The energy had been washed out of me along with the shampoo, and I was left with the kind of tired that cancels out any residue feelings of embarrassment. I put on some fresh clothes, shoving my old ones in an airtight bag, and began folding. It wasn’t until the moon was high in the sky that I finally put away the last shirt, cased the last pillow, and hung up the last curtain.

I made myself a sandwich, my first meal of the day that wasn’t a cliff bar, and called my sister to rant about the whole affair.

“Were there a lot of eggs to pull out?” She asked.

“I couldn’t really tell, they didn’t look like much. But it took hours to do the whole process.”

“What do you mean they didn’t look like much? They’re supposed to be brownish when you wipe them off on a paper towel. You didn’t see anything?” She sounded truly astonished.

I thought back to my first lice sighting: a white spec in the parting of my hair.

Could that have just been… fuzz? Did I spiral and make my head itch by the power of my own brain? Over fuzz? Did I just go through that entire day of laundry mishaps and snake scares and embarrassing moment after embarrassing moment because of FUZZ?

I Googled what dead lice eggs look like and went numb… See for yourself: What lice eggs look like on a paper towel. VS What I saw.

Yep, yes. Yes, I did.

Advice for the Next Adventurepreneur

This section is tradition, but honestly, I don’t feel qualified to give advice after admitting all of that. Thanks for reading, “Lice, Laundromats, and Losing My Mind.” Hope it made you feel like less of an idiot.

Love you, good luck, and stay sane.

Alia

Next time on Sent Packing: Alia’s Secret Travel Journal

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