The Beverly Hillbillies Go to the Spa

As it turns out, Arnedillo is home to an attraction that we did not know about before we left Barcelona.  Or, to be more precise, none of us knew about it except Alec.  Alec had found the hotel, rented the car, and basically planned the entire trip.  He did a fabulous job.  But he failed to tell any of us that Arnedillo has thermal baths.  I love baths, especially when they are out in nature.  But because we had all had to pack so light to fit our stuff into HVJrII, no one had packed a bathing suit.  No one, that is, except Alec.

But the women in my family are not famous for their modesty.  Or at least we won’t let a small thing like the lack of a bathing suit come between us and some thermal baths.  So we improvised—the kids would wear their short pajama bottoms, I had a black bra and underwear that matched okay, and Jody had black underwear and a camisole.  Matt opted out.  Alec, of course, had his bathing suit.  The Beverly Hillbillies go to the spa.

We walked along the river, past the beautiful gardens organized into neat squares, the squares divided into rows of onions, lettuce, artichokes.  Many small towns in Spain have these gardens just outside the town.  The towns are so dense that there is no room for a garden next to or behind one’s house.  The garden plots are large—large enough for a household to grow most of it’s own produce.  And the gardens—called huertas here—sit next to a river, if there is one, and the town itself.

We walked for about 15 minutes, past a part of the river where the locals were bathing.  An older man sat on a rock and changed under a huge bedsheet type article with a hole cut out and elastic’d for his head.  We asked him and his wife how to get where we were going—they bathed right there, they said, because it’s free.  But we had no towels, and had not brought portable changing rooms with us.  So they directed us up the hill to a hotel, where we bought tickets for the pool and rented big, white terry robes that doubled as towels.

The kids were ecstatic just to be in the water, which was warm and salty.  And the setting could not have been more spectacular, set in a valley with the mountains all around.  And the pool itself was a trip—it contained a tiled spiral and had a current that pulled you into and through the spiral.  It felt great and I just started laughing and whooping as the water pulled me along.  Zadie and Matt watched from the sidelines, and we made her laugh by jumping and splashing.

We got some lunch and then hit the road for the long trip back to Barcelona. It always takes longer than you think, even though the baby was tremendous, again, and there were no threats of puking until we were within spitting distance of the city.  We got home around 10, unwound, and got ready to start another week.