A Night at the Spa

Now that Francisco has a full staff, he has every other Sunday night off. He wanted to enjoy and relax on his first Sunday night free, so we went to the spa. His sister is a travel agent for Corte Ingles so she helped him find a nice spa resort just an hour away from Barcelona. It was wonderful.

We arrived at the four star hotel ready to get pampered. Francisco had gotten the packaged that involved a dinner, breakfast and an hour at the spa’s thermal baths. We got there at 7:30 and our dinner reservations weren’t until 10:30. Since we couldn’t go in the baths until the next day, we wanted to take advantage of the spa. Luckily, there were open spaces for two massages. So we signed ourselves up for a 50-minute complete body massage. It was amazing. Considering I don’t really do much around here, I didn’t need it as much as Francisco did. He looked like he was in heaven when I met him at the lobby after our massages.

We then went to a nice three-course dinner that included a bottle of cava. It was delish! I started with a salad while Francisco had the soup. For our main course, we both had the fish with pea sauce. For dessert, we had caramelized apple eggroll with vanilla ice cream. It was so good my mouth is watering just thinking about it.

After we decided to go for a walk to burn off the food and look for a bar so we could get drunk. Unfortunately, the little pueblo had nothing open on a Sunday night. We ended up at the hotel bar and were able to get one drink in before it closed.

The next day, we went to the thermal baths. There must have been some confusion because the lady gave us three hours and access to another part of the spa. We weren’t going to argue with her so we were happy to take it. We started in the big pool where they had chorros...I have no idea what they’re called in English. They’re this waterfall type of things and you stand underneath them. There were also water jets to massage different parts of your body.

Then we moved on to a very shallow pool that had massaging water beds. This was my favorite part. You just lay on this metal bed under the water and water shoots out all over the place to massage your body. I could’ve stayed there forever.

After a nice relaxing tea break, we moved on to the other part of the spa that we got for free. It was a roman bath, which means there were pools at different temperatures. One was at a normal, tolerable temparature of 38 degrees celsius. The other two were the extremes: one at about 16 degrees and the other was at 44 degrees. The former was so cold that I think my toe froze when I dipped it in, and the latter was so hot you could see the water evaporating. I couldn’t quite get myself to get in the hot/cold pool. So I stayed in the normal one and enjoyed every minute of it.

We also enjoyed other features like the “dream shower” and the sauna. The sauna was great, although after a while the heat was making me feel lightheaded and it started to smell like nasty sweat in there. Right outside the sauna was a shower that was supposed to be good for you after a few minutes in the boiling heat. I decided I needed to refresh myself. I turned on the shower and screamed like a little girl as the freezing water hit me. The spa attendant apparently left out that detail when she gave us a preview of the spa. Fortunately, everyone had the same reaction and it made me laugh each time I heard that scream.

After almost three hours, we had to leave because we had lunch plans with Francisco’s brother. We were so relaxed that it was hard to get motivated to move. Actually, it was difficult to move at all. It was like were floating on air and our muscles were putty. We were both in cloud nine. Unfortunately, we found ourselves back in the traffic and chaos of the city two hours later. Sigh. At least we enjoyed it while it lasted.