Spa Weekend in Baden-Baden

Since we had yesterday and today off from school, my girlfriends and I drove to Baden-Baden, near the Black Forest, on Saturday and spent three days relaxing and enjoying the spas.
On Saturday night we had a fabulous Indian dinner followed by a morning at the gym and an afternoon at the Caracalla Therme on Sunday.

We enjoyed some pools and saunas and felt completely relaxed. We finished up our Valentine's Day by watching The Bachelor and the movie UP in bed and ordering pizza. We ended up with a Funghi pizza (doesn't that sound lovely) even though we asked for one with spinach, artichokes, and mushrooms. We decided that Germany is definitely not all about customer satisfaction, so we just let it go. I didn't bring my camera around the spas with us, but I got some postcards and scanned them, so you can see what it looked like. Bear in mind, it is Winter out, so it didn't look exactly like this, but you can get the picture:

 

  

 

 When we came out of the spa after our three hours, these stairs were entirely filled with people waiting to get in. Apparently going to the spas is the hot thing to do on Valentine's Day with your sweetheart....

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Yesterday we started the day with some shopping around the little town and then went to the Friedrichsbad (Roman-Irish bath) where we went through about 15 stations of different temperature pools, showers, saunas, warm rooms, and finally a nice rest at the end room where they wrapped us up in blankets to enjoy a womb like tranquility. We decided that we really enjoyed the combination of hitting the gym then going in the 85 degree (C) and 95 degree (C) saunas and would choose the Caracalla spa over the Roman spa if we ever go back. It was so relaxing and we felt completely stress free and content. Last night for dinner we went to a fantastic restaurant called Le Bistro that was close to our hotel. They specialized in some different game meats so Christy, Christina, and I ate venison and Jill had spaghetti bolognese with Wild Boar. The food was amazing! We followed our dinner with some  mouth watering desserts that left us feeling like we needed to be rolled home.

 

  

  

  

  

fur coats and hats were all the rage...

  

  

  

  

 

We drove back this morning, which took a little over 3 hours. We were originally planning to take a train, but the tickets were about 122 Euros each, so we decided to drive our car instead. That worked out really well and we saved a lot of money! I have been trying to clean up and get laundry done since I got back and in about an hour I have to go get John at work, since I have his car. He had to get rides to work this morning and yesterday since he was nice enough to let the girls have the Prius for our spa tour!

It's not going to be easy getting back to work tomorrow after having 5 days off, but we had a great weekend!