Baden-Baden

For the second day of our honeymoon we drove from Fontainebleau just over the border into Germany, to the German spa town of Baden-Baden. Here theremal spring water at 60-odd degrees has meant that there's been some settlement or other here for many centuries. It's good money that there were Roman baths here. It's the sort of thing they'd do. The main star of this town is the Friedrichsbad spa, a so-called "Roman-Irish Bath." It turns out that one Dr. Richard Barter from 1800's Co. Cork pioneered a Roman-inspired bath house concept of dry air and cool pools and, crucially: nudity; for general health and wellness, which caught on in a big way in Germany and Switzerland. The more we didn't know. Friedrichsbad is one such famous example. Friedrichsbad has a strict 17-stage process of showers, cold pools and increasingly warm saunas, all in a beautiful ornate building that opened in 1877.

Our plans for today largely revolved around visiting this spa. Having found a nice spot to park a ten minute cycle from the town, we headed in to Baden-Baden proper and had our first ice creams of the trip. This was followed by some good mooching and a beer in a beautiful-if-over priced beer garden in the old town. Suitably emboldened, we entered the spa where we were assigned lockers and a towel and told to remove our clothes. The Germans have a refreshing outlook on nudity: it's just a naked body. We all have one. Get over yourselves. Wandering around an array of showers, saunas and splendid ornate swimming pools surrounded by naked people young and old has never seemed so normal or refreshing. Suitably relaxed and calmed, we finished our evening with a pizza and then a few beers on one of the plazas before heading home on our bicycles along the wonderful cycle paths back to the van.Read more