It’s cold.  I’m ready for a hot vacation.  But I’m broke. So, naturally, I head down South Tacoma Way.

My friend Maria and I make the Olympus Spa our destination, casting off the thoughts of snow with our clothes as we head to the pools and heated rooms that transplant us into Shangri-la for the afternoon.

I‘ve also scheduled myself a wrap, which I thought was the same as the moisturizing treatment I’ve seen.  I was wrong, gloriously wrong.

The moisturizing treatments look like dying and going to salad heaven â€" basically, you sit in an open treatment room with up to six other women, all as naked as you, and get olive oil rubbed on your body and cucumber mulch packed onto your face. In the same rooms, the exfoliating body scrubs also happen, where teeny, biking-shorts clad Korean women harf on every part of your body with what is, effectively, plastic sandpaper.  Your skin tingles and glows like you’ve just drunk a gallon of neon after this treatment, and even the rougher parts of you feel like a newborn baby’s bum.

It’s divine, even when the woman scrubbing you is pulling up a butt cheek to get at skin you had no idea needed exfoliating.

But today, I’m not getting one of those treatments. After sitting in the 104 degree hot-tub, the 97 degree hot-tub, the 93 degree mineral bath, and then back to the 97 degree tub, I get taken by massage therapist Kari Welch into a private room, and get a mud-like concoction, good for detoxification, slathered on me.  Then I’m wrapped in a plastic sheet (painter’s drop cloth?) and one of those mylar emergency blankets. I get a sublime face and scalp massage, and then sit for a while. 

For me, it’s excruciating. I’m a multi-tasker by nature, but here in the dark, sweating profusely, I can do nothing but clear my mind and relax.

Time passes quickly.  I shower, and then decide to extend my “vacation” by going into the Sand Room.  The thing I love about this room is that I can pretend I’m on a beach, and create wells for the parts of my body that extend beyond flat (use your imagination.)  I can only last in the heat for about 15 minutes, after which I sit on the heated flat room in between the waiting room, the wet room, and the heated rooms.  Groups sit and chat, or read magazines, or, like me, just rest.

It’s about time to get back onto the ice, so I make one last visit to the wet room, shed my robe, and heat my body up in the 104 degree tub.  Nearly poached to well-done, I head over to the 60 degree pool (with waterfall!) and do the super-quick dunk, then rinse off with a sluicing from the mugwort well.

My vacation is abruptly ended as I walk into a parking lot covered with ice, while snow flurries around; but even though I’m no longer relaxing in the heat with a group of naked women, the warm afterglow remains with me. â€" Jessica Corey-Butler