Saturday, 27-July-2024
I’m in Germany, soaking in a hotspring that Mark Twain once visited, and said that  “After 10 minutes you forget time and after 20 minutes you forget the world.”
I mean, I didn’t expect to be taking travel advice from Mark Twain, but that’s a pretty dang intense recommendation if I’ve ever heard one. How could I say no?
I couldn’t, and the end of July found me melting away in the glorious spa of Friedrichsbad. Warm showers, followed by warm mineral pools, with salt steam rooms, saunas, hot tubs and lap pools… the spa really was a fully intense experience. I found myself fully understanding what Mr. Twain had said, and that after the first room or two I really had no idea what time it was, or how much time had passed.
It was a completely different experience from the pools of Iceland – there, the focus was mainly soaking in one specific pool, or possibly moving from cooler to hotter, and back again, as I found in Krauma… whereas in Friedrichsbad it was a sequenced ritual. Very German, which should have come as no surprise in retrospect, where we went through 16 rooms in sequence. Phones were, of course, left in the lockers so my dear readers will have to forgive me a lack of photographic documentation… but understand that it was absolutely beautiful and stunningly Romanesque.
For more photos, I fully recommend checking out their website – for now, I’ll sit back and luxuriate in the memory of the warmth, the salty tang of the air, and the serenity that I was suffused with.
Link = https://friedrichsbad.net/
