On Saturday I drove up into the mountains to a hot springs resort where, for an affordable fee, you can spend all day soaking in hot and cold artesian spring-fed pools, and hike 1600 acres of undeveloped woodland so that you feel, when you get back home, that you've been on an adventure to some far-away, exotic land.
Besides hiking and soaking, I spents lots of time lying out on the decks catch up on my reading, did yoga under the trees, ate delicious home-grown food, sat catatonically in the sauna, and saw quail, wild turkey and deer. A man played a cello by the stream beneath a flowering pink magnolia tree; the sounds of weekend Kirtan ( Hindu devotional chanting) rose up from the garden; a delicious breeze kept the day from getting too warm (yeah I know - life's rough in California).
It's kind of a hippie Club Med, and sometimes I go there to revisit the spirit of my (somewhat mispent) free-spirited youth. Times have changed, though; I had to laugh at how many half-naked, dreadlocked, pierced, granola-eating, patchouli-wearing hipsters were stretched out by the pools reading their Kindles in the sun. Me, I was kicking it old-school by carrying around an actual book. Hey, what can I say...still a rebel.
And I guess I'm not completely domesticated yet, because I left my shoes up there and didn't even notice until the next day when I was about to head out to a painting workshop. So apparently, you can take the girl out of the commune, but you can't always take the commune out of the girl.
