Hot Springs!

On Friday we slept in...wonderful. All week the girls let me sleep in the single bed. What a treat.

Before Chelsea had to go to work, we ran to Dutch Brothers to get coffee. Mmmm, Oregon coffee. I think someone should put a Dutch Bros. stand on the corner of Lear Rd. and the Highway. I think it would do a good business. I would go every day. That would be delicious... Medium Vanilla Latte for me, iced coffee for Chelsea and Katrina. I can't handle iced coffee. Just tastes wrong.

Then Katrina and I had a lazy morning and had lunch with Chelsea and Jim and David (friend of Jim's) at Glenwood. I had the "Garden and Grain" sandwich, with lettuce and tomato and avocado and cucumber and cream cheese and yummy bread. It was delicious. I keep thinking about replicating it at home... I realized at that point that I hadn't had any meat since arriving in Oregon, and decided to see if I could keep it up. So many vegetarian options!

Chelsea had a meeting so Katrina and I wandered around the campus and the shopping area near the campus. We went into the UO bookstore and I was thankful that my school colors were not yellow and green. They're nice colors, but a whole bookstore full of it was shocking. Not like purple, which feels like home. :)

We saw a couple of boys playing with a tightrope they had strung between two trees, and watched several a capella groups sing in an outdoor amphitheater. It felt like a very different campus, but maybe I just haven't been on campus in a while. We saw a girl with hot pink hair and discussed dying my hair for the summer...

We caught up with Chelsea and she suggested we stop for Bubble Tea. Bubble Tea is some strange stuff. It's tea, or some other sweet drink, there are lots of flavors, with giant black balls of tapioca in the bottom. You drink the whole thing through a huge straw and when you get a tapioca ball, you chew it up. It's like a flavorless gummy ball. I had peach tea flavor and it was very sweet. And strange. And fun.

We went back to Chelsea's apartment and discussed what else we wanted to do. We finally decided to head out to the Cougar Hot Springs. Katrina asked if we had to be naked, and Chels said no. As we were walking up to the Hot Springs, she did mention that other people probably might be...

The Hot Springs generally has 5 pools, each a little cooler and a little lower than the previous, but a tree fell down last year sometime and so they were doing work to rebuild the pools, and only one was open. When we got there, there was a drum playing family, a married couple, and a man. The woman was wearing just the thong part of a bikini. The husband normal trunks, and the man nothing.

She was VERY chatty, telling us everything we would ever want to know about the Hot Springs. We HAD to go sit in the cave, and the water would drip down on us like rain drops. Then we HAD to fill up a bucket of cold water from the stream and dump it over ourselves. We should NOT be there after dark, or we would get a big ticket. She also spoke disdainfully of the "Forest Fairies" who came out from the forest "butt naked" and who didn't even shave. It was funny to hear all of that from a woman less than 1/4 dressed.

The man was quietly meditating, doing yoga, and stretching. Foot above head, that sort of thing.

yes-naked stretching.

We did sit in the cave, and it was very hot, and the water dripped down on us, and we did fill up the bucket with ice cold water. The woman helped, I complimented her on her lovely nails, she told me her husband spoiled her, I said that was good, she looked me square in the eye and said intently: "A good man is hard to find." I agreed. (Thanks Matthew, for letting me go on a trip all by myself and sit in a Hot Springs with naked strangers).

We drove home through the pretty dusk, smelling like sulphur and giggling like schoolgirls.