The Shower Cap Travel Tip

Does anyone use shower caps anymore? For those that do, the free shower cap amenity in hotel rooms (along with the cotton ball and four Q-tips) must be like manna from Heaven. But for the rest of us, the otherwise useless shower cap is actually even better. So before you toss it aside with the three-inch emery board and makeup-removing swab, let's take a look at at least two travel tips for the humble - and FREE - shower cap.

For years, we've collected our hotel room shower caps and used them to wrap our shoes for packing. This keeps the dirty bottom of your shoes away from your clean clothes in the suitcase. If you really want to splurge, you can use one shower cap per shoe. But generally, one standard cap will cover the pair.

1 standard shower cap. 1 pair of size-12 tennies.

A more recent use we discovered for the shower cap was as a food covering. The elastic band holds the cap snugly in place around the food bowl or pan, and you don't have to fight with an unruly roll of plastic wrap (is there any other kind?). Granted, we're probably not the first to use a shower cap like this. In fact, you can buy colorful versions of essentially the same thing at the grocery store in the Saran Wrap aisle. But why pay for them when you have access to at least one per day per hotel stay?

Cover your fudge. (That's NOT a euphemism.)

Oh, and one more travel tip in relation to the shower cap: while you can reuse a shower cap over and over to wrap your shoes or cover your food, do not use the same cap to cover your food that you used to wrap your shoes. And vice versa.

We welcome your inventive uses for hotel room shower caps or any other general travel tips.