Yes, it's true. Not only can you cloth diaper all day long and all night long... but you can take cloth on the road. Don't be shy, it's not hard at all. You don't buy throw away underwear for road trips, why make your baby sit in a hot paper diaper?

Whether you're venturing out for a day at the park, packing a bag for a weekend trip, or planning a week long vacation - cloth diapers are simple enough to take along for the ride with just a few basic preparations.

A Day Trip

Dump out your diaper bag and get rid of all those crumpled receipts, gum wrappers, and empty tubes of lipstick. Fill it up with just the necessities:

• Cloth Wipes & a small bottle of water to wet them with. These double as quick wipe up cloths for sticky fingers and faces.
• 3 - 4 cloth diapers and 2 - 3 covers if not using All in Ones.
• Hand towel or changing mat.
• Waterproof wet bag to tote dirty diapers home in.
• Burp cloths
• Bib
• Bandaids
• Spill proof sippy cup filled with juice or milk for your older child.
• Bottle of milk if no longer breastfeeding.
• Small bags of finger snacks.
• Your extras: Wallet, keys, sunglasses, lip balm, cell phone.

Now you're set for a day at the lake! Lather children with sunscreen before leaving the house and bring an extra set of clothes for your children and a picnic in a sack and you're ready for a day of adventuring.

Weekend Trip

A weekend trip's items won't vary too far from a day trip's items. Of course you'll have a bit of luggage for your clothing, toiletries, and pajamas. You'll need all of the above - just multiply the diapers and covers for however many days you'll be gone. Bring along a larger wet bag (a clean pail liner works well) to bring home all the dirty diapers in. If you're staying with a relative or at a hotel, you may be able to use available laundry facilities to wash diapers and other items of clothing before coming home.

Keep a changing pad and extra diapers handy in the car for changes along the way.

Week Long Vacation

How many diapers, covers, and wipes you take depends on where you're headed. If your destination has laundry facilities, you only need to pack enough for a day or two. If you're headed somewhere without laundry facilities - like camping, for instance, you'll need to bring enough for the whole week, plus a clean pail liner to tote the dirties home.

Now before you balk at the idea of camping with cloth diapers - I've done it! For a whole week, and it wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was fun. So fun, that I've done it several more times since I wrote this story:

Camping with Cloth Diapers

My annual family reunion is held in the high Uinta Mountains. There are no trash cans, no paved roads, no bathroom facilities. If you haul it in, you either burn it or haul it back out. I didn't think plastic diapers filled with poop would make for a very enjoyable camp fire and I certainly didn't want to haul a smelly bag of them back down to the city so I decided to try cloth diapering in the mountains.

Not being as prepared as I'm sure you will be, I wasn't sure how many times I changed my baby in a single day, so I decided to err on the side of caution and pack nearly every prefold diaper I owned:

• 40 chinese prefolds
• 7 doublers for night time
• 6 PUL covers
• 2 Wool covers
• A couple of cute fancy diapers to show any relatives who might think me loony
• About 3 dozen cloth wipes
• 2 squirt bottles filled with water (to wet the wipes with)
• Waterproof bag for the dirty diapers

My baby was still fairly young and mostly breastfed during this, our first camping adventure with not only a baby, but cloth diapers - so those unoffensive breastmilk poops weren't a huge concern. We set up our tent, and I hung a clothesline between two trees. I hung my wet bag from one of the trees by the clothesline. I would change my baby on our blow up matress inside the tent. A wet diaper would hang on the clothesline for a while to air out before going in the wet bag. This helped keep ammonia build up from smelling up our camp. When he was messy, I'd roll up the prefold and toss it right into the wet bag.

Later when we went camping and Jake was having more solid and stinkier poops, I dug a hole and shook all the solids into the hole before dumping the diaper into the wet bag. That may sound extremely primitive, but when you're camping in the wilderness, grown up people poop into holes in the ground too!

The wet bag never bothered us with odor - whereas my cousin who was camping with a baby close to the same age as mine, had flies buzzing around her trash bag full of dirty disposable diapers. We drove home with the wet bag in our car and when I got home, I just dumped the whole thing into the washing machine and congratulated myself on a successful camping trip!

Some Final Tips

Whether you're venturing out for an afternoon or an entire week these final tips may be of some use:

• If you don't know already, prepare ahead of time and count how many diapers you go through in any given week. Then you'll know how many to pack for a week, weekend, or just an afternoon.
• Prefolds may be easier to take along than a bag full of AIOs if you're going to be gone for longer than a few days. Prefolds and a weeks worth of covers take up less packing room than AIOs, and dry faster in the event you need to hand wash or rinse them. They also air out nicely for smell-free packing home.
• For longer trips, even if you don't plan on being gone long enough to need to wash your diapers, take a little container full of detergent just in case you run out. If you're camping, you can always heat water over the fire to wash dipes, our ancestors did it - surely we can step up to the bar and make them all proud. If you're touring, even small towns have laundromats you can stop at.
• Wool covers pack well and air out very, very well. Take a few and air them out during the day. We only used two during our week long camping trip.
• And of course, being the cloth diapering enthusiast that you are, take along some "show off diapers" to impress the locals with! Don't forget a couple of business cards from your favorite online shops where your new converts can shop for their own!
• The Real Diaper Association has printable postcards and pamphlets - be sure to print off a few to take along. It's easier to answer curious questions about your baby's bum wear when you've got an easy list of resources at your fingertips. Cards and pamphlets spell out the benefits of cloth and look professional to boot.

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