In the 2.5 years my daughter wore diapers, we bought just six packs of disposables.  I’m sure I could have done better if I’d really set my mind to it.  We didn’t deal with the nighttime diaper dilemmas some parents face, so we used cloth at night.  We also traveled a lot during those years, and we stuck with cloth diapers for several of those trips.  (I know, I know–traveling is not green at all!  Read about my personal crisis over traveling here.)  Here are some travel tricks that worked for us.

Check out this ode to station wagon living!

Go somewhere with washing machines.  Most of our post-baby trips were simple affairs, visiting family or staying in rental houses (rather than hotels) equipped with washers and dryers.   If I thought someone might be grossed out by washing my dirty diapers in their machine, I used disposables.

Wash when you return.  On short weekend trips, we just lugged the diapers back with us and washed them at home.  With my wet bag, this wasn’t a problem.

Get a good wet bag.  Joy wrote a post about her Bumkin’s Dirty Duds bag here.  I bought a wet back from a sporting goods store, which holds more diapers (about three or four days’ worth).  It doesn’t leak or emit odors.  I would not recommend traveling with a diaper pail, though I know some have done it.

Use disposables en route, but switch back to cloth once you’re settled.  We didn’t tend to do much multiple-destination traveling with the baby, so this worked well.  On shorter trips we stuck with cloth the whole way, but if we were traveling all day long, we didn’t want to lug dirty and wet cloth diapers through airport security.

Dry diapers out the car window.  Okay, I did not actually try this one–but my grandmother did!   She posted a comment on the post comparing cloth to disposables, revealing her cloth diapering secrets from 1952, when she and three kids traveled across the entire country.

As those six packs of disposables show, I did resort to disposables every now and then, so I’m no cloth diapering angel.  I always packed disposables on extended plane trips, but others are much braver!  Check out Sunrise on the Water’s Thrifty Green Thursday post to see how she survived cloth diapering on a ten-day trip to Hawaii.  Let us know your cloth diaper travel tales, tricks, and tips by posting a comment.