Problem: I’m a soakaholic and our house has no bathtub.
Solution: A weekend trip to Breitenbush Hot Springs.
Breitenbush, a hot springs area about 12 miles from Detroit in the central Cascades, has served as a ritual retreat for unknowable centuries. Indians gathered there to fish and soak in the centuries before the area was homesteaded.
It became a private retreat about 50 years ago and maintains this hippie vibe that we often go for while traveling but don’t always practice at home.
It’s basically summer camp for grownups.
Since I met my husband as a camp counselor in my early 20s, I can’t think of anything more fun.
Trip Breakdown:
L. and J. joined us in Salem for strawberry and banana pancakes on Saturday morning. We hit the road for Breitenbush about 10:30 and made it by 12:00 p.m.
We checked in.
We ate crunchy hippie food of steamed brown rice, roasted squash, salad, and cheese and broccoli soup.
We spent about half an hour in a Turkish bath (steam sauna) built directly over a hot spring.
No pictures of that, you cheeky monkeys, this isn’t that kind of blog.
We dipped for about an hour in a 102 degree hot spring pool.
Three of us continued on to a hotter hot spring, and then finally to the hottest, while I, having already found my just right, dried off and headed to the lodge, where I read The Watchmen and sipped yogi tea for an hour and a half.
We gazed into the Jackson Pollock of stream beds.
I joined about 23 other people in a cramped but gorgeous room called the Sanctuary for a yoga session far beyond the difficulty offered at my local YMCA. In our last hometown of Iowa City, the Sanctuary was a bar…
We stayed overnight at a Batesian Motel called the Four Seasons.
We breakfasted at a pretty amazing local joint called the Cedars, where the walls were adorned with saw art. As in, art painted on canvases formerly known as saws.
We played a game called “Going Camping.” L. won after J. fell on the “got sticky fingers, go back five spaces” spot.
We drove west into snow for about 30 minutes before discovering that the trail we had hoped to traverse was covered with it.
We got out of the car and walked onto the uncovered bed of Detroit Lake, which appeared to me like the landscape I had pictured while reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
We headed for the afternoon to Willamette Mission State Park, just north of Salem, where we viewed the ghostly outline of where the mission once stood and stopped to chat with the world’s oldest black cottonwood tree.
Upon our return, we read the Sunday Oregonian, which I enjoyed far less from having been out in the world all weekend.
