After reading Travel Editor Stephen Scourfield’s hotel-room washing tips in the paper on Saturday, a reader emailed us with a story that offers two timely travel reminders.

The first is don’t accidentally miss a hotel fire alarm by sleeping with earplugs in, and the second is to never improvise by risky ways to dry your washing.

Staying at a hotel in Lucerne in Switzerland, our reader was woken in the middle of the night by his wife as the fire alarm sounded. After removing his earplugs, he heard someone shouting “Fire!” and opened the door to find the corridor filling with smoke.

Grabbing only a backpack containing their passports and medication, the couple made their way down the fire escape and waited outside while firefighters dealt with the incident.

Fortunately, there was no major blaze. Instead, the smoke had been caused by another guest who had tried to dry wet clothes by draping them over a lampshade with the light left on, which wasn’t the brightest idea.

Looking back, the reader says sleeping with earplugs in a hotel is something he’d also think twice about in the future.

If you missed Stephen’s column over the weekend, here’s his simple, safe method for drying clothes in a hotel room.

WASHING TIPS

Let me first say that a couple of years ago, I finally gave up worrying about the cost of hotel laundry bills and it’s been liberating. My hotel room no longer looks like the older tenement neighbourhoods of Mumbai, India (where there are massive, open-air laundries).

But, when I don’t have time for that (“a different bed every night” used to sound raunchy but now it’s just exhausting), I use a trick I learnt watching women in Kyrgyzstan making felt. Women preserve this old nomadic tradition, passed from mother to daughter, to handcraft chemical-free felt from sheep’s wool to make shyrdak carpets and ala-kiyiz rugs.

After cleaning and soaking in olive oil soaps, they wrap it very, very tightly in a chii (reed) mat, and then walk along it, dance on it, stomp on it and kick it to one another. I lay a towel on the hotel bathroom floor, roll my small washed items in it and do the same. It’s probably not a pretty sight, but it really aids fast drying (and it presses them too).