A little more than five of the twenty shower minutes I had purchased were down the drain, so to speak, when I was asked by a woman with an accent about the logistics of the shower. Having experienced confusion myself upon entering the Wahweap Campground shower house–due to discrepant information–I gladly shared what I knew: Although the campground info sheet and signage indicated that eight quarters were used for a fifteen minute shower, the machine inside the shower actually only took tokens — tokens that needed to be purchased across the way in the laundromat. I had trudged down to the shower house with a roll of quarters, had to go back up to our campsite to grab singles instead, then had to sweet-talk the token machine into accepting those singles; you know how sometimes when a coin machine takes paper dollars in exchange for coins or tokens, only to then spit those perfectly good paper dollars back out, for no apparent reason, only to accept them on the third or fourth attempt? Yeh, you’ve had that happen…
In fact, it took three $1 bills to obtain three tokens and it turned out that those three tokens bought a whopping 20-minute hot shower. Not bad, and certainly worth the extra steps. So there I was, enjoying the hot shower when she asked, then I shared that 3 tokens buys a 20-minute shower. Apparently, all she had was quarters. What happened next drew my admiration: She asks, “Are you almost done with your shower?”; which I was, as six or seven minutes had passed by now which is ample time for a shower, “If you are, may I use your last minutes to have a quick shower?” Admittedly I was, for a nanosecond, annoyed, I even said, “Well yes, but my stuff and clothes are all spread out in here”, to which she replied, “I will help you move them to another stall”, which is when I surrendered to the fact that from one woman to another, from one camper to another, from one adventurer to another, we all savor a hot shower. I wrapped my towel around me, opened the door, and lickity-split, we moved my stuff.
As I was drying off then dressing, she thanked me several times. I said, “We are in this together sister, I am happy to share the shower!”. I truly admire her for having spoken up, it’s what I think I would have done, also. Spray It Forward!
For what it’s worth, John’s shower sprayed only cold water, and the fellows that arrived after him found the token machine to be broken, so they had no shower at all!
