Dec 28, 2007

“HEY there’s no schwag!” my wife, Nina, exclaimed from the bathroom of our room at the Gaia Napa Valley Hotel.

The Gaia, which advertises itself as “Napa Valley’s first fully environmentally sustainable hotel,” has eschewed the tiny plastic bottles of lotion, shampoo and conditioner, instead using wall-mounted dispensers. I breathed a sigh of relief that neither the collection in our bathroom at home nor the infamous raft of plastic garbage in the middle of the Pacific, which I imagine to consist largely of hotel amenities, would grow larger from this stay. (more…)

November 9, 2007

JEANRIC held my gaze in his, smiling softly. “Close your eyes,” he whispered in a gentle French accent, “and relax.”

He took me in his muscular arms, cradling my shoulders from behind as my feet left the bottom of the pool. My naked body swirled through the warm water of a hot spring until I had the distinctly expansive feeling of tumbling across the star-strewn Milky Way.

The promise of ecstatic moments — whether from body treatments or just the soothing nature of the waters — has drawn visitors to Northern California’s natural hot springs since people first discovered them thousands of years ago. The West Coast’s seismic activity provides plenty of opportunities for water to seep deep underground, where it is heated and mineralized before re-emerging, transformed and imbued with seemingly magical properties.

Read it on the NYT site…