I would miss having a dryer too, which seems faintly ridiculous to me as I managed for years in Scotland without one, and here I am in CO using a dryer - I really will have to stop embracing the American way quite so whole-heartedly! I really like hardly having any ironing to do, I have to say.

I spent a year in France where my room-mate and I bought this contraption for about $30 - it was like a toy washing machine, you stuck it in the bath tub and stuck a hose on the faucets. The whole cycle took about 10 minutes - it was just one step up from the effort of washing by hand or going to the laundrette. It was a bit like this http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/32...g_machine.html