May 7th 2012.
We arrived to the Charles De Gaull International Airport in Paris at 7:55 a.m. We picked the
van and the car up and started our journey to Baden Baden Germany.
Most of us did not sleep much on the plain so we slept through the car ride.
This is the scenery from the van
From Allison Major's Journal
We got off the plane went to get out passports stamped and located the van. I
was disappointed to find out that they don’t stamp your passport for every
single country that you go to. Everyone can drive freely from one country to the
next without any sort of regulation. You can’t even do that going from the
United States to Canada. I like the convenience and freedom, but I really,
really wanted my passport to have a stamp from every country we’re going to.
I’ve also decided that I want to live in Baden-Baden Germany. Everything
here just seems to make sense. There are solar panels on almost every single
house, solar farms and winds mills all over the place. Dr. Anna said the Germany
is on of the leading country in sustainable development; that’s the main reason I want
to live here.
We’re staying in a spa town in the Black Forest, which was named by the
Romans Baden Baden. The roads are so narrow! Roads that don’t look like roads are, and the
ones that look like one way are two way. I’m amazed everyone’s cars here aren’t
beat up and dented. There are cobbled streets and plants in every walk way,
window, and garden bed. This has to be the most beautifully decorated town known
to man, Wisteria plants dangle from every corner and it’s just truly beautiful.
We went to an amazing spa called Caracalla. It was a perfect idea
to recover from such a long plane ride and then car ride to Germany. I
felt like I was in an ancient Roman bath house. There was an enormous
warm pool area with a small fountain in the middle that we dipped in
first. Dr. Anna told us to go to these hot/cold pools that were
supposedly good for our circulation. The hot pool was by far the best,
it was in a cave like enclosure and had an enormous waterfall in the
corner of it that beat down on peoples backs. It felt amazing! The cold
pool was much smaller and also in a cave like enclosure. It really did
feel amazing to go from hot to cold waters; it was just a bit shocking.
There was also an aroma therapy room that was hot a steamy and very hard
to see in. It smelled really wonderful and was just relaxing. Some in
the group didn’t like it because they thought it was hard to breath and
could only be in there for a few minutes, but I really enjoyed it.
Paige and I were the only ones who braved the nude upstairs part
of the spa. Everyone came with us but when we started to peel off our
bathing suits they bailed. We ended up getting kicked out of the sauna
section because we needed towels, but we came back. The last part of the
spa I went into was by far the best; I called it “The Blue Room”.
Someone gestured up at this pulsating blue light coming from the second
floor and asked what it was. So, of course Paige and I being the only
ones who would go into the nude part of the spa, we went to investigate
and ended up enjoying it the most. The room was completely silent when
we went in and there were inclined beds in a circle around the room. We
laid down on squishy inclined beds and I closed my eyes for a minute.
Then I started to hear the softest most beautiful harmonics. It sorted
of just snuck up on me. I felt like I wanted to keep my eyes closed but
the blues in the room were so beautiful and it was as if the harmonics
were pulsating through me that I had to keep them open. We told everyone
that they didn’t know what they were missing.
The German Black Forest town Baden-Baden is famous for its hot springs that gave the town its name. Bad (say the “a” as in “what”) in German means bath, or spa if added to a town name – Baden-Baden justifiably got it double.
Baden-Baden has 23 hot springs where water boils from around 2,000 m (6,600 ft) below the ground to bubble out at the surface at temperatures up to 68°C (154°F). Daily, around 800,000 liters (208,000 gallons) of mineral-rich waters feed the fountains and spas of Baden-Baden.
The Celts already enjoyed the hot springs of Baden-Baden but after the Romans evicted them around AD 70, bathing was elevated to high culture. Parts of the Roman baths were rediscovered during the nineteenth century and can now be seen in the Römische Badruinen (Ruins of the Roman Baths) in the center of town.
The existence of the hot springs in this are is related to the deep faults at the eastern end of the Upper Rhine Graben. This area represent one of the famous divergent plate boundaries. The crystalline rocks of the Black Forest are displaced downwardsby almost 2 km (ca. 6500 ft) in the graben, and about 17 normal faults can be found at different elevations. The original springs located close to the Main Thermal Fault at the SE-slope of the “Florentiner Berg;” where, the new castle (Neues Schloss) is built .
http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull21-3/art6.pdf
The bath house
is named after the famous Roman Caesar Caracalla who liked to come here
to treat his arthritis in the spring water
These pictures are from the website of the spa:http://www.carasana.de/en/caracalla-spa; You can not take camera inside.
We had dinner at our bad and Breakfast called Gashouse Linde. The food was delicious.
