I generally try not to gush about anything related to California because I think there's enough hype out there about it being the best state (a friend once told me that, if California was a country, it would be the 7th largest economy in the world -- see, absolutely no need to encourage that kind of behavior when the rest of us know that cessession went out of style like 150 years ago).
The talk gets worse when it comes to SoCal -- Southern California, but last weekend, I visited a place near L.A. that almost made me change my mind.
My friend, LP, suggested that we take a long-overdued, well-deserved spa day this weekend. So I flew out to L.A. and took a drive along I-15. At first I thought she was just taking me to an ordinary day spa in a mall. But as we drove further and further out into the desert, I realized that we were not going anywhere near a mall. An hour out of the suburbs of L.A., LP turned off an exit on I-15 that said "Glen Ivy." LP joked, "Look, this spa is so big, it gets its own sign off the freeway!" And sure enough, we drove into the mountains of San Bernardino Valley and there was
Glen Ivy Hot Springs. For $48, you can spend a whole day (that's 9-5) at this hot spring PARK. I've never seen anything like it. There are about 10 pools that each have its own "specialty" from mineral baths, mud baths, to sulpher baths. The highlight is the California red clay mud bath where you get to lather each other up in indigenous red clay and bake in the sun. Afterwards, you can go into a sauna like cave and steam it off. For an additional 20 bucks, you can put all the moisture that was sucked out of you from the mud by going in these underground caves where attendants lather you up with aloe and various green lotions until your skin is supple again. You also get an apple at the end of the trip.
When you get sick of wading in the pools and slathering mud all over yourself, you can eat at their gourmet restaurant by the pool side or get a treatment in one of the spa houses that surround the pools (massage, facial, haircut, mani&pedi).
For about $50 bucks, the entire day was well worth it. I would not suggest the underground caves much though -- the caves were artificial and the lotion I could've put on myself above ground.
