Turns out today was a really good choice. Hadn't expected the white supremacists to have been marching in Charlottesville yesterday. Hadn't expected the nation to be demanding the freakin' President of the United States denounce actual neo-Nazis. Hadn't expected to be so disappointed in so many of my countrymen. (I can say that I expected, as a general rule, to be pretty disappointed President Trump, but I hadn't thought -- I really, truly hadn't -- that the whole damn country would be looking expectantly to him to condemn something as indisputably condemnation-worthy as a white supremacist driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, and yet...) Nutshell: I am depressed by shit I can do nothing about, which threatens long-term peace of mind. So escaping for a day of indulgence is a really good plan.
Alice and I didn't want to do a standard day spa thing -- where you go and get a massage and get a facial and meet when you're passing in the locker room. We decided something a little more destinationy: one Glen Ivy Hot Springs.
Glen Ivy is a bit crowded on a summer Sunday. By the time we got there (just after 11), we had to park in the "additional parking." Made our way to reception (after some guy did the mandatory bag check -- and confided that he isn't really security; he does massages later in the day) and checked in. We got directions on which things to do when, stopped at their little Starbucks (tea!) and made our way to the locker room.
There are a certain amount of, er, out of date statements on the Glen Ivy website. One of them is the bit where they "respectfully request that you leave all electronic devices turned off. We encourage a digital detox while at Glen Ivy and therefore we do not provide WiFi." Much later in the day, we learned that there's WiFi in the Starbucks. AND we saw damn near everyone had their phones with them. And, upon getting home, I noticed the map they'd handed me upon check-in encourages you "Instagram your Hot Springs pictures using the hashtag #GLENIVY." So, "digital detox" my butt, basically.
BUT, we hadn't figured any of this out when we checked in. So when we got to the locker room, we did the obligatory selfie ...
... and then locked our phones in our lockers. (I love how Alice is doing the total selfie-model pose, whereas I look like I'm plotting something.)
Glen Ivy recommends a three-step process: (1) Mineral Baths (for to open pores); (2) Club Mud (for to draw impurities out of your skin); and (3) The Grotto (for to moisturize). Honestly, I don't know if any of that shit WORKS, but it's an experience and it's fun, so I'm in.
The Mineral Baths are a few small pools -- really small pools (most of them take a max of two people, and there was a larger one you could cram about 15 into) which smell like sulfur and tarnish your silver jewelry. All the two-person ones were taken, so we joined the group in the 15-people one. They had air jets going, so sulfurous water was bubbling up all around us, and the whole experience was part soothing and part ... toxic cleanup site?
We did not spend long in the mineral baths.
We moved on to "Club Mud."
(Another lie on the Glen Ivy website is the suggestion to bring your own towel. There's towels everywhere. In fact, you have to toss your (locker room) towel upon entry to Club Mud and use a special Club Mud towel. Because Mud.)
Club Mud is an area of the spa where there's a pool of (muddy) water and, on a stand in the center, a big ol' pile of red clay mud. You go in the water to get yourself wet, and then slather on the mud. Cover pretty much everything not covered by your swimsuit. (I avoided my face, because of the specs, but, yeah, that's an option.) They then have a nice warm room (but not as toasty as outside) where you can sit and wait for your mud to dry. At this point, I speculated that there's people in the Glen Ivy Executive Dining Room, watching us on a secret webcam, adjusting their monocles, and heartily laughing, "Can you believe we got them to PAY US to cover themselves in mud?!!"
Now, there is one special thing we got to take part in. Usually, you just shower off the mud, but they were offering a little treat called "Sudsy Mud." Sudsy Mud involved some guy (probably the same dude doing security checks when he's not doing this) spraying you with a high pressure hose blasting soap. We watched Sudsy Mud guy blast two women before us, and, when he was done, NOW they were covered with Mud AND white foam. I wasn't really sure WHAT was in that hose, but I imagined it was akin to the stuff in a fire extinguisher. We HAD to do that.
I again regret that our phones were in the locker. (We later noticed, when he was spraying the people after us, he had the hose in one hand and their camera in the other.) So you're just going to have to imagine what we looked like. Soggy. Giggling. Foam everywhere. Mud underneath it. Imagine a gentle, skin-friendly version of tarring and feathering.
The only thing for it are the Club Mud showers and, yes, the sudsy soap made the mud removal pretty easy.
We had some time before our Grotto reservations, so went back to the Starbucks (more tea!) and then off to the Grotto.
Well, no, wait. Actually, I had to take a bathroom break. (I mentioned all the tea, right?) I was wearing a one-piece swimsuit, so using the bathroom required, well, taking the whole damn thing off, and resulted in me very nearly saying aloud, "Holy Hell, how did mud get THERE?!" The entire front of my swimsuit is lined with white fabric, and quite a bit of the inside lining was now brown in color. Lovely. Good thing I'd followed the website's directions and brought a swimsuit I didn't care very much about at all.
The Grotto is an underground experience taking place in four rooms. In room one, you stand in a little alcove while a woman with a paint brush paints you front and back (wherever your swimsuit isn't) with some green moisturizing body masque. Then she has you hold out your hands and pours the rest of the bowl of goo out into them, telling you to apply it wherever you want (except your forehead, so it doesn't drip in your eyes). Then you move into room two, a darkish, peaceful, warm place with benches, where you're supposed to sit for 10 minutes and continue to massage that crap into your person.
I said "benches." I lied. The theme of the Grotto is an underground cavern, so the benches are stone and rough-hewn to seem like stalagmites that have gotten out of hand and connected themselves. The problem is that they are sloped downward toward the floor. And the backs of your thighs, I might have mentioned, are covered in slippery goo. I sat on one of the benches and gingerly put my feet up on it. In what HAD to be a badly-thought-out move, while massaging the masque into my legs, I also took some of my leftover goop and massaged it into my feet. The bottoms of my feet. So we're here for another 10 minutes, and while I'm having a nice chat with Alice, part of my brain is flashing back to High School Physics, mentally drawing vectors of all the forces working on me -- the tilt of the bench, the lack of friction between my feet and the bench... and the odds of me staying on the bench seem so slim, I have a vision of the alternate universe where I slide off the bench and end up a green-goop covered puddle on the floor.
As time passes and staying seated seems to be winning the day, we decide to (gingerly) move on to the third room, which is showering the goo off. (Alice holds the door open for me. How the hell they expect ANYONE to hold the door handle, after having had goo poured in their hands, is beyond me.) Sufficiently de-gooed (the mud had actually been easier to remove), we moved on to the last room: tranquil rest area. (Even more tea! And apples!) I quite liked the tranquil rest area. It was tranquil. (And restive. And an area.) But Glen Ivy was very busy that day; we couldn't even find two open deck chairs in Club Mud. Here it was nice and cool and peaceful and uncrowded and QUIET. And we talked. About Charlottesville. About what good people CAN do about it. About what some people are doing already. And there, in the tranquil rest area of the underground grotto, it didn't seem so insurmountable anymore.
Yeah, then we got massages. Because, fuck it, it's a day spa. :)
Before leaving, there was, of course, the obligatory shower. Upon stripping off the swimsuit I discovered that the brown stains on the lining were now joined by greenish stains on the lining. My God, this swimsuit looks like I had a food poisoning incident of epic, EXPLOSIVE proportions. I feel kind of bad for my lousy Costco swimsuit -- I never intended it to live longer than this, but what a way to go.
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