In Episode 2, I face one of travel’s great equalizers: doing laundry in a foreign country.

What starts as a simple chore turns into a comedy of confusion, humility, and one very opinionated pair of socks.

If you’ve ever stood in front of a foreign washing machine praying for a miracle, this story will feel uncomfortably familiar.

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Restless Viking Radio Season 1 Episode 2 Laundry Abroad I'm Chuck.

Today's story Laundry Abroad, A tale of travel, humility and the universal truth that sooner or later everyone has to face the spin cycle. Let's dive in. You know how travel blogs always talk about this thing called immersion?

They seem to make it sound like you're going to melt right into another culture, sipping espresso with locals, learning poetic phrases, maybe discovering your true self between a yoga mat and a wine bar. But real immersion? That happens when you run out of clean underwear in a foreign country. That's when things get spiritual.

The kind of enlightenment that smells faintly like recycled airplane air. And what's ever been fermenting in your shoes since Reynkjavik? Now Poppins and I travel light, carry on. Only three, maybe four outfits.

Total efficient. Sure, until you hit the universal truth of travel. Eventually you have to do laundry somewhere. You don't speak the language.

I didn't understand the chaos that creates until I lived it. This was years before Poppins and I returned to Iceland. Back then it was just me and our son Noah.

Eight days into the trip, when laundry went from a background thought to a full blown crisis. The socks had turned on us. I checked the local directory. No laundromats, Not a single one. Just a handful of services offering pickup and.

And next day delivery. And that's great if we weren't leaving town in the morning. And honestly, I don't trust those next day promises.

All it takes is one tiny delay and suddenly your socks are being held hostage somewhere in Husavik and you're halfway to Olus SFjorter. Without them. We didn't have that kind of time. And then. And I was proud of this moment, I had what felt like a stroke of genius. Campgrounds.

Campgrounds usually have laundry facilities. So I found a little urban campground on Google Maps, grabbed the rental keys and headed out, feeling like I had just solved international logistics.

Now the campground looked familiar enough. A little store, shower house, a few tents flapping in the wind like deflated balloons.

And inside the store, the woman behind the counter was trapped in a conversation with a camper who was one of those people that clearly believed he was her favorite person on earth. And she humored him. And I waited. When it was finally my turn, I asked hopefully if she spoke English. And she did. I asked about laundry.

She asked for 10 krona and handed me two shiny tokens. Perfect, I thought. I thanked her, hoisted my trash bag of dirty clothes and went hunting for the machines.

Now I always try to keep A low profile when I travel, which apparently means sneaking around like a bargain bin. Detective. I slipped along a narrow sidewalk behind the building and then spotted a door with a window inside. A washing machine. Jackpot, I thought.

I stepped in. The room was basically a broom closet with ambition. It had soap softener, dryer, sheets.

I thought it was strange that it was fully stocked, but I chalked it up to some sort of cultural laundromat thing. I loaded the clothes, shut the machine, then the washer exploded to life. I froze mid reach, a token still in my hand. What the heck? I thought.

I hadn't put the token in yet, so absently, I started hunting for the coin slot. Everything was labeled in Icelandic, or possibly Klingon, and even though I didn't know what it said, I was feeling pretty confident.

Then some sort of instinct kicked in and I tore around the tiny room like a raccoon raiding a campsite, checking every corner, every panel, every crevice for a place to shove that damn token. After a few minutes of pointless poking and muttering, I thought, well, maybe the dryer explains all this. Maybe that's where the tokens go.

Or maybe Icelanders put the instructions in the dryer. I didn't pay a lot of attention, and I felt smugly efficient. So I stepped outside to explore around the building and campground.

And that's when I found it. Another room. Bigger, brighter, lined with washers and dryers. The real ones. The ones that take tokens. And it hit me.

I had just hijacked the campground staff laundry machine and panic set in. I sprinted back to my little broom closet crime scene and grabbed the washer handle. Locked.

Tumbling inside were my clothes, pounding around like hostages in a front loading prison. I tugged hard. It didn't budge. I pressed every button to try to stop the madness, but nothing worked. They just kept spinning in the sudsy water.

Through the half window of the entry door, daylight poured in. For some reason, I ducked beneath it, careful not to be seen.

I crouched there like a fugitive, hiding from the law, whispering apologies and rehearsing a confession. For 10 solid minutes I kept peeking through the window, trying not to be spotted. And then she stepped outside. The woman from the store.

I could barely see her at an angle from the window. As I hid in the shadows, she sauntered down the road away from me. My heart started pounding like a bad drum solo.

There I was, a grown man, veteran of Arctic expeditions, reduced to peeking from a window in a campground laundry closet. But eventually guilt won. I walked casually, or so I hoped, back into the store token in hand, and confessed everything.

She gave me the look reserved for toddlers holding broken lamps. Half amused, half pity and a hint of disappointment, I offered her a token like a peace treaty.

She took it with a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. No one has ever done such a thing, she said, firm but kind.

I apologized at least a half a dozen times, thanked her for not calling Icelandic authorities, and returned to my closet sized penitentiary to wait. When the washer finally clicked open, my clothes were free. Damp but free.

I moved them to the bigger room, to the proper dryer, shoved in a token and let it roar to life.

Afterwards, I stuffed the still damp laundry in a trash bag, slung it over my shoulder, and walked back to the car with all the dignity a man can muster after committing accidental appliance theft abroad. So fast forward four years. Poppins and I are back in Iceland, and this time I consider myself an Icelandic laundry veteran.

We were on day five of a two week journey. Mountains, glacial lagoons, lava fields, beaches. I even gave her a ring at what felt like the edge of the earth.

Our clothing supply was, let's say, compromised, and we made it to a hotel in some town I couldn't pronounce. At check in, a cat was sitting at the front counter, which is always a good sign, and behind it a paper sign caught my eye. Laundromat.

And that's a rare treasure in Iceland. The little sign had flyers. Cheerful photos of washers and dryers looked simple enough, so I grabbed one like I had just found a treasure map.

And later that afternoon, Poppins packed the laundry neatly responsibly and we headed out. The address led us to the docks. Not the pretty docks, the working docks with salt in the air and lumber stacked high.

The building that was listed on the flyer was long, industrial, lined with anonymous doors. A few had tiny little signs. Some were just stickers slapped to the door. We started trying them. Pottery shop, Art studio, Garage bay.

Another garage bay. They were all wrong. One door led into a hallway labeled Six Apartments. We stepped inside and down the corridor was a door marked laundry. Bingo.

I opened it and froze. It was pitch dark. I found a switch and a single fluorescent light flickered awake, revealing one washer, one dryer, a mop bucket, and a giant sink.

The whole room was maybe the size of a walk in closet, and my instincts twitched. I didn't like it. Poppins, however, was done. She was tired, windblown, and six days deep into what we can now call full on Viking mode.

Her eyes said, who cares? It's laundry. I don't think this is it, I said. A flashback hit me. The first incident. The hiding. The shame. This isn't the right place, I insisted.

Before she could answer, I bolted outside and approached a man working inside one of the open garages. Laundromat, I said. He looked up with the patience of someone who has dealt with tourists his entire life. Yes, he said in a thick accent. Downstairs.

I raised an eyebrow and must have looked puzzled. We were already on the ground floor. He sighed. Go around Small sign. I thanked him and sprinted back.

When I opened the apartment laundry room door, Poppins was already loading the machine with the calm determination of a woman who has reached the end of her laundry related patients. This isn't it, I said. She didn't even look up. Her back was turned, but I felt the eye roll. It radiated like heat from a wood stove.

Every married man develops a superpower sooner or later. Mine is knowing exactly when Poppins rolls her eyes, even if I'm not in the same hemisphere. This says laundry, she said flatly. It washes things.

That's the job description. I know. But it's not the Laundromat. This is the apartment laundry.

She paused long enough to calculate exactly how much nonsense she was willing to tolerate today, then resume loading one shirt at a time. Seriously, I tried again. It's like some stranger using our basement laundry room. And honestly, I was probably a little disheveled at this point.

I think my previous embarrassment might have been fueling my enthusiasm. She exhaled the long suffering sigh of someone who's been dragged through multiple wrong doors, two locked garages, and a pottery shop.

Okay, she finally said. She started unloading the machine and I tried to help badly.

Then came the next eye roll, the one only I could detect, and I quietly demoted myself to door holder.

We got back in the car, drove around the building, and parked near a line of old fishing sheds where men were working nets and eyeing us with a calm suspicion reserved for troublemakers. And then we saw it. A tiny computer generated sign taped to a door. The kind of thing that screams Freshman Graphic Design Project, it said. Laundromat.

Inside was an expansive space. An honest to God Laundromat, folding tables, the faint smell of powdery detergent.

A wall lined with stray socks and random shirts arranged like a lost and found boutique. In the corner a vending machine held four candy bars dangling from one tired corkscrew dispenser.

A Sharpie note taped over the glass promised coming soon. Along one wall were eight machines. They looked new enough to smell like A showroom with two credit card terminals glowing proudly beside each set.

No problem, we thought. But then we looked at the machines.

It had buttons labeled A, B and C, whatever that meant, temperatures that looked like bingo numbers, and a display flashing two like it was a ransom demand, and different icons that looked vaguely like laundry tubs with random numbers assigned to them. I swiped the credit card twice and nothing happened. We pushed buttons, we opened doors, we pushed other buttons.

Numbers were flashing random digital letters, but nothing happened. Poppins was performing heroic levels of patience at this point. We muttered, speculated.

We had no idea what was happening or what these industrial sized machines wanted from us. Finally, I looked over at the dryers and noticed that two of them had timers counting down. I tried one and it responded. Well, that felt promising.

After some trial and error and a fair bit of muttering, we realized we needed to use the other credit card terminal to activate a washer. Eventually, one grudgingly came to life and we picked a cycle the way you pick a number at a roulette wheel.

But honestly, I think Poppins seemed to decode the cryptic symbols better than I did.

The drum spun, the machine groaned, and we stood there like gamblers, watching the ball bounce, hoping it landed on clean and dry instead of child sized sweater. And that's when Poppins had had enough. She walked over to a plastic laundromat chair, turned around, paused, then sat down with a heavy sigh.

Her face dripped with fatigue. She opened her book and disappeared from the world, knowing it would be good for me to disappear and give her a little space.

I stepped outside as a ship was easing into the docks. There was a smell of diesel and seawater in the air and I found myself wondering, why is a laundromat tucked into a commercial fishing port?

Back inside, I posted our plight on Facebook. Proof of survival. Then another tourist wandered in and froze.

He was staring at the machinery with the same wide eyed confusion I had worn four years earlier. And I watched him for a minute, judging him, judging myself. Maybe I wasn't the only fool. He looked over at us, completely bewildered.

And that's when it happened. I became the professor of Icelandic Laundry. I walked over and explained the whole process step by step, emphasizing every part I had gotten wrong.

He thanked me politely, and then he proceeded to figure out entirely on his own. Laundry at home gets you clean socks, but laundry abroad seems to give a little humility, and if you're lucky, just maybe, a story worth telling.

Looking back, it's funny how life insists on repeating its lessons until you actually learn them. Four years and a few gray hairs later, after the first Icelandic laundry debacle, I found myself right back where I started.

In a strange laundry room, holding the wrong tokens, trying to convince my wife that this time would be different. But it wasn't. But you know, that's travel.

It knocks you around, spins you a few times, and if you're paying attention, you come out a little lighter, a little humbler, and just a bit cleaner than before. It.