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March 01, 2005
Spa
While at the Grand Wailea, of course I had to check out the spa, which is renowned world-wide (or so they say).There are actually two spas, one for men and one for women, which as far as I can tell (from the pictures, and from talking to my wife) are essentially identical. You sign up for a massage or whatever, but then they give you an hour beforehand to explore the various hot tubs they have. The pictures on the page linked to above show some of that (except you have to subtract the half-naked hot spa babes and add in completely naked dumpy spa guys). The picture at the top shows the "Hawaiian bath" which is a giant hot tub, next to a small cold plunge (60 degree pool for freezing your yayas in). Then below that the small picture shows the 5 "Terme baths", which are tubs of various warmth, containing water with different kinds of dissolved goop (seaweed, mud, etc) which turns them interesting colors, as you can see. You sit in each of the baths for 5 minutes while the water works its healing/soothing/recalibrating magic, and then briefly wash off in the "Swiss Jet Shower", aka the car wash, that has about 50 nozzles shooting high-pressure water at you for 30 seconds. Below that is a picture of the "Cascading Waterfall Massage", where a big stream of water gushes down on your cranium for 5 minutes -- a bit painful for my tastes, although some people love it.
There's also a sauna and steam room, and a Japanese bath and cold plunge (the difference from the Hawaiian bath is that the Japanese one has nozzles bubbling water up from the floor, instead of shooting in from the sides). My favorite was to alternate between the steam room and cold plunge. Gets your skin a-tingling.
The Pro Club, the gym that Microsoft gives all its Redmond employees a free membership in, remodeled a few years ago and added its own fancy spa. The literature when they were building it claimed that it was inspired by the Grand Wailea spa (and also the spa at Bellagio)...having now experienced the GW, I can say that the lobby of the Pro Club spa may have been inspired by it, but the actual facility falls short. It's very nice, but there's no Terme this or Cascading that.
Posted by AdamBa at March 1, 2005 11:05 PM
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