Soaked!

 7:35 am - Tuesday - December 14th - Anza Borrego Desert, CA - 55° F, 61% humidity, wind 4 mph out of the south......lots of clouds this morning, and rain is on the way, we think....forecast high today is 66° F.  I usually wait until the next day to show pictures of today, but when we opened our bedroom curtains around 6:30 am this morning we scrambled quickly to get dressed, and outside to take the following pictures......this place is literally one of the most magical places we have visited over the 10 years we have been traveling fulltime in our Newell.....these pictures perfectly illustrate that fact....↴

Is that a rainbow first thing in the morning?

Do you see both ends of the rainbow?

The hills to the north of our boondock site just lit up!

.....I just had to share these pictures in real time.

Over the years we have been coming to the Anza Borrego Desert we have hiked a lot, biked a lot, and seen just about everything in the area there is to see, and since we arrived here this year we've really only gone into town a few times, and spent the rest of our time right here at our boondock site.  Nevertheless, I was getting a little restless and decided to see if I could find some hot springs within a reasonable driving distance.  Warner Hot Springs, only 36 miles away, has been closed since the beginning of the 'pandemic', so was out of the question.  There are hot springs located on the eastern side of the Salton Sea, but they are 75 miles away.....that's a long way to drive for a two hour soak, right?  I finally found this little out of the way place about 47 miles from us called Agua Caliente Springs, which is part of the larger Agua Caliente County Park near Shelter Valley.  TLE and I decided to make the 52 minute drive over on Monday leaving around 11:20 am, and arriving around 12:10 pm.....

.....TLE took a few pictures on our drive....it was very overcast, so there is not a lot of color.

The park itself is well kept, and there are quite a few RV sites with hookups ranging from electric only to full hookups ($33/night), as well as cabins ($80+/night) which can be rented.  We were surprised, but actually happy to find the place nearly deserted, and we pretty much had the soaking pools to ourselves....

  

.....there is no one on duty at the entry kiosk, so you self register....cost is $3/person for access to the soaking pools, and $3 per car, so we paid a total of $9.....very, very reasonable.  The restrooms where we changed into our swimsuits was nice, and very clean....

.....there are three soaking pools in all including the 'cold' pool below.....

 Cold pool  (Internet picture)

.....and the HOT pool below, and it was hot.....just the perfect temperature.  The third pool, of which I did not take a picture, is around 100° F......kind of feels lukewarm, while the HOT pool must be around 106-107° F.  Needless to say, on a cool, cloudy day we spent 99% of our time in the indoor HOT pool.....

Indoor HOT pool (internet picture)

.....the walls of the indoor HOT pool are sliding glass doors, which can be opened, and the roof has motorized panels which can open revealing the sky above.  For a County park this place exceeded our expectations, and we could see ourselves visiting here again, perhaps in the Newell, for more than a day.  In all we soaked for about 2 hours before deciding around 2:10 pm it was time to head for home.  We were home by 3:15 pm to find the skies had turned stormy in our absence....

.....in spite of the cloudiness our solar panels managed to get our house batteries back to 100% charge.  Monday was a nice change of pace, and loved Agua Caliente Springs!

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