As I've been upgrading my offroad vanlife 1998 GMC Safari ahead of summer, I turn my attention to my bathroom setup. In this episode, I talk about what I used last year and what I changed for this year. The biggest change being adding a Flextail Max shower. Which can be found here : www.flextail.com/products/max...
This shower is a lightweight and portable shower, that is a huge upgrade over the gravity solar bag shower from World Famous that I used last year. This shower is intended for "Emergency" use only. I intended on grabbing showers along the way at campsites and other places like that along the way, but this is a perfect solution for the days that I need a shower but can't find a convenient solution. It's small, super portable, pretty cheap, and definitely worth the money. That shower will pair perfectly with the new portable toilet I am using this year too, so after testing the shower, I show you why exactly I ended up with the portable toilet I will be using.
First, I was going to use it with the wide mouth water jugs I found on Temu here: www.temu.com/ca/camping-water...
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But I realized that I might not want to put my Max Shower into my clean drinking container, because I will likely use it at some point in potentially contaminated lake/creek water. So while the jugs might be a good solution, they weren't the final solution for me. So here is where the portable toilet comes in. First off, last year I used a Reliance brand "Luggable Loo" bucket toilet lid (www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/re...) I thought this would be a good option because it was compact, and The fact that it was a bucket meant that It was versatile. Wrong. It never feels right storing items in a bucket that you have pooped in before. Even though you lined it with bags first, it still just never feels right. So considering I am looking for a bucket to hold water to shower with, this option had to go. At this point, I raided my shed where I had two options. First was the "Porta Pottie Continental", the absolute peak of 1992 portable technology! While this was a great unit, it doesn't serve my needs, so in comes the Reliance Hassock portable toilet. This toilet has actually been replaced by the Hassock 2.0 ( relianceoutdoors.ca/products/..., but I a still rocking the OG version. This toilet fits perfectly under my van's bed platform after some trimming, and even though it's slightly bulkier than the bucket toilet, it has one critical feature. 2 buckets! First, it has an inner bucket for you to do your business in, and then it's main body can be used as clean storage for like 30 or more liters of water for a shower. It also has a black lid so I can fill it up and let it warm up in the sun prior to use. How good is that?
Also, I do want to point out that this toilet is again mostly just for emergency use, it is not intended to be my main bathroom for an extended period. If it was I would look into a pop up bathroom tent cover for it, which might also be a good option if I wasn't traveling alone.