Down the Drain

I rose from my bed today with an important question to answer: Do we need to buy special toilet paper for our trip?

As a family encompassing funny insides and two smallish children, this is clearly a key issue to get right. We don't need any clogged thingies or overflowing wotsits. (I presume I'll learn the correct terminology in due course, though as I am rather planning to leave the toilet department to beloved Hubby, perhaps I'm wrong about that. Which reminds me that I need to buy him a pair of rubber gloves.)

Anyway, to cut a long story short, our friends at Google provided links to a couple of very good RV info sites. Of course there were the usual range of ideas and insights, from "Spend all you've got on special septic tank paper made by this women's collective in Ohio" to "We've been RVing for 30 years and only just moved on from dry leaves to newspaper." But leaving the outliers aside, the general conclusions were:

(1) Don't buy the expensive special RV toilet paper at Camping World etc
(2) Go for single ply over 2-ply. Scotts single ply is much recommended.
(3) Test your paper before you set out, by putting a couple of sheets in a jar of water, shaking it vigorously, waiting 15 minutes, and then seeing whether the sheets have broken down into shreds. If they have, use it. If they haven't, go back to the store.

I couldn't find a jar, but correctly judged that Hubby's capacious Gartner beer mug would do the trick. Having now undertaken a scientific comparison test of the CVS own brand and Seventh Generation recycled toilet papers, I think we'll be going with Seventh Generation, which had shredded almost completely within just a couple of minutes after the vigorous shake. Good. Another problem resolved.