This past weekend, Beth and I decided to get away from it all and head to the mountains – Hot Sulphur Springs, to be exact. We visited the hot springs 2002 and told each other we’d like to go back. Maybe we’ll even make it a regular annual event!
I did some research online about lodging and decided on the Canyon Motel, which has a “romance package”. You get a king size bed in “one of the best rooms”. They also throw in passes to the hot springs resort, fresh flowers, a fresh baked treat, and a bottle of champagne. I told them we only needed a single pair of passes, since we wouldn’t get up there in time to go soak in the mineral springs pools Friday night.
Hot Sulphur Springs is the county seat of Grand County and home to around 300 people. There’s not much in town, but people visit for the hot springs and for the hunting, fishing, hiking, and horseback riding in the vicinity. It’s a little over two hours from our house.
I left work later than I’d hoped on Friday, and then had a lot of stuff to deal with at home before I could even start packing. So we didn’t leave the house until around 6 PM, and then immediately stopped for dinner. We got to the motel around 9 PM, where we were checked in by a very bubbly young English woman.
The motel has been recently renovated and is in nice shape. Our room wasn’t huge (“one of the best” may not really mean that much) but it was comfortable. Sure enough, our guest passes to the hot springs were waiting for us, as was a huge bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge. And someone had baked us a little red velvet cake in the shape of a valentine.
Saturday morning, we eventually got out of bed and went to the only place in town to eat breakfast, the County Seat Grill. Service was terrible, as I remember it was last year when we visited. Note to self: when dining in Hot Sulphur Springs, go to the restaurant about an hour BEFORE you’re hungry. After breakfast, we went to the hot springs and soaked in several pools for about an hour and a half. That was enough to get prune skin, so we went back to the motel.
We had planned to have a pizza delivered for lunch, but when Beth dialed 0 on the phone, nobody answered. I went to the office to have a look and saw that they were closed until 2 PM. So we needed to find another place for lunch. The reason we were looking for pizza was that we paid $10 extra to have pizza while we were here. They bake a pizza for you at the front desk and then deliver it to your door for $10.
So I walked down to Jim’s Fat Boy Deli to find some sandwiches, but they were closed. That gave us three options for lunch – either go back to the County Seat, eat frozen burritos or hamburgers from the gas station, or drive to another town. We decided to drive to Granby, where we had lunch at a nice family restaurant (with good fast service, this time).
After lunch, we went back to the motel. Beth took a nap and read her book, while I read a magazine and worked on some music stuff and some work stuff. Then we went back to the hot springs. Beth had a facial and I soaked in the pools for a long time, while the snow fell and the local deer came down the hill. Once I got pruney again, I got dressed and went inside to read my magazine. Beth soaked for a while longer and then we headed back to the motel. We ordered our pizza (which was DiGiorno, baked by the bubbly young English woman and delivered to our door) and dined on the bed, while watching CNN and drinking champagne. That night we just relaxed and watched a bunch of TV. I didn’t feel like reading my book anymore, and my notebook computer wasn’t cooperating with me. So we watched a mind numbing series of shows on commercial television. The one I liked most was called American Chopper. I may even watch it again, since the first episode pulled me in!