Before we left, I found this little bird on the ground just outside a door to a building - maybe it had flown into the door and stunned itself. The picture gives no scale, silly me, but it was a tiny little bird - sat with plenty of room on the palm of my hand! I walked around with it for a while and it seemed quite content, and eventually flew away. I'm glad, as I wasn't sure what to do with it if it couldn't fly.
Chena Hot Springs contained a lot of cool things to look at, and most of the rest of this post will be sharing photos. I'm continuing to work on this lesson 'You don't have to do everything,' and am glad of it. There were several 'activities' that one could do at the resort, and I just went in the hot pool a couple times, walked around, sat and wrote for a while, people/plant/animal-watched - it was plenty!
This sculpture made of moose antlers greets you as you come in, as do a couple taro plants in pots - what are they doing out of Hawaii??
This is the rock pool itself - a pool of naturally heated, super-sulphurous water, it's about 105 degrees most of the way through and maybe 110 at the end to the left of the photo.
The locker rooms to get into the rock pool (as well as the indoor chlorinated pools in which I had no interest) featured showers with warm, sulphurous water so that you felt like you were showering in mashed up warm hard-boiled eggs! It wasn't particularly crowded, but you wouldn't have known that from the locker room. There was barely room to move in there - you had to line up to lift up an arm! I think it was partly poor design with all the lockers elbowed in a corner, and partly that the room was genuinely too small for what it needed to do.
Little Peeves
The woman at the front desk explained to me that the pool water contains a lot of bicarbonates and a lot of sulphur and that both of these can be hard on hearts that are not fully developed, which is why they don't allow under-18's into that pool. That's also why they warn that it can tarnish silver jewelry. Nice side-effect that it's a quiet area with no screaming and splashing. But then, the second time I went in the pool, a woman was in there with her baby! I wonder if she knew that the rule was supposed to protect infants, not just for the sake of having rules. Of course, I had my own skepticism about how the pool could be a bad thing, but that's simply skepticism meaning I need to research further. And going in the pool definitely had noticeable effects on my body (bluntly, I was extremely dehydrated, and then got 'the runs') so I could see how it might be hard on a baby.
That second time too, there were some guys who were jumping in and splashing (even though they were clearly over 18, haha), which was not very restful.
But worst of all, a woman was smoking in there! She was there with her husband and daughter, 50-something lean and langorous in her leopardskin bikini and dyed-blond hair scraped back in a ponytail, basking on a rock half out of the pool, semi-discreetly in a corner. But then she was in the pool with her husband, posing for photos, cigarette in hand! When she got back out on her rock, she handed the cigarette to her daughter while she climbed up, then took it back. Her own self-contained universe, like a force-field around her, so that I couldn't go up and articulate how angry this made me.
I found someplace else to go in the pool (she was at the hot end, which of course I was most drawn to), and found something else to look at, and thanked goodness that the wind was mostly blowing the smoke away.
Inspiring Gardens
The decor was all rustic/agricultural
- old farm equipment, the pump cranking the irrigation a central feature:
- but the nice thing was, this was for real. There were some great gardens here:
a beautiful, long herb bed
lemon balm, several mints, basil (!), tarragon, parsley;
A big veggie garden, mostly cole crops:
And then there was a garden with what looked like eggplant (no fruiting yet, corn (!) and squash
I love to cloud-watch. Can you see the face in this cloud, looking down at the rock pool?
love to all.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I greatly appreciate any and all comments, and endeavor to respond to each one individually. Until I have figured out a fully automated comment platform, I try to 'hand-deliver' responses to comments to your email address. If I don't know your email address, please check back here within two days for your response!