Therme Vals

A couple of years ago R somehow decided that the best way to celebrate her thirteenth birthday would be with a trip to a spa. We thought it would be the spa in Hershey, PA, which has chocolate treatments. Since we are here we went to Therme Vals.

We began the day at the farmer's market in Oerlikon to get some snacks for the long train ride. I love the Oerlikon market on Saturday! It has more of everything, but best of all it has the bakery which sells florentiners (flat circles with nut toffee on one side and chocolate on the other.)  And this must be the best time of year to go. There were flowers everywhere.

 It's surprisingly hard to get rhubarb at home. No problem here!

R was fascinated by these roses which she said "looked too real."

 R picked up a pastry from the florentiner stand.

She wants to grow romanesco, and now purple cauliflower, too.

It was a long ride down, which is why we decided to stay overnight, and the last part on the bus was pretty scary. We were crossing one lane bridges and making hairpin turns on roads with no shoulder. Chunks of guard rail were ominously missing. But the last part of the train ride was awesome because we got excellent views of Ruinaulta, the Swiss Grand Canyon. We didn't take pictures through the train windows, but this is what we saw. I linked the picture from http://schiersdelight.wordpress.com/tag/hiking/ I hope that is okay, since I suspect my readership is in the single or low double digits and I am giving full credit. I've bookmarked the blog to look over later. The author takes beautiful pictures which really evoke how Switzerland feels, not just how it looks. 

Anyway, as soon as we got to Vals we went to the spa. Pictures aren't allowed inside, which is just as well. It all looks like the picture above, though, with sparkling quartz stone everywhere, modern lines, and moody lighting. There was an indoor pool, an outdoor pool with massage faucets, fire and ice pools, a sort of secret pool off to the side which led to a sound chamber pool - small with a very high ceiling - in which they played music which was probably supposed to sound like relaxing echoing chanting but which sounded more like my Uncle Jim's moose call. There was an aroma therapy pool full of flower petals. Interestingly, they didn't all float or sink but were evenly spread all through the water. And they were all perfectly fresh. There was a room where you could lie down and listen to music made by a pendulum dropping water onto stones. R liked the big pools best. I think my favorite was the tall shower. It was a huge shower head that was very high up (at least fifteen feet) so it became a massage shower.

We left the pools early enough to have some hot chocolate on the patio before check-in. This is the view. You can see the grass covered roof of the pool building. The bottom picture looks back toward the patio.

We checked into our room, put on our robes and slippers, and headed down for R's massage. R definitely enjoyed it. I was in the room, too, because she is so young, and just  the sound of Enya and smell of chamomile oil had me almost nodding off. After relaxing with a drink in lounge chairs by the floor to ceiling windows R didn't want to lose the feeling so we headed back to the room and read a time travel novel together (Timebound) until dinner. We ate in the Red Room, which was R's second experience in fine dining. I think it's not wasted on her. She vividly remembers almost every course from the other meal four years ago.  We returned to the room to find our beds had been turned down. We got our coats and went outside for some very good star gazing, a great finale!

This is the Blue Room lounge which leads out to the patio.