2013 Travel Guide To California
Retreat and Reinvigorate
Soaking up California’s spa culture
by Lavinia Spalding (google+)
In San Francisco’s vibrant Japantown district, buses and bikes whiz by, teens congregate and people text as fast as they walk. But inside the Kabuki Hot Springs, the city vanishes. The only sounds in the dimly lit, Japanese-style communal baths are the gentle splashing of water and occasional strains of soothing music.
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Carried Away
OZZY IS GIVING ME ATTITUDE—bumping against my pack, nosing ahead, blowing his semisweet-fermented breath in my face. I nudge him on the chest to keep him behind me as I inch down the steep sandstone, but he clearly has personal-space issues. I chose Ozzy . . .
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To the one who was supposed to get away
What I remember, 15 years on, is not your face or hair or hands, nor the beach or full moon above us that night. I remember the safety cone. It was bright orange, brand new, and perfectly incongruous, so we stared at it for seven hours. My friend swung by . . .
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To Old Johnny
Your shop was smaller than our kitchen but better stocked, the shelves on both sides of its entrance packed to the ceiling with shrimp chips and kimchi, dried cuttlefish, ramen noodles, and vacuum-sealed chicken drumsticks. It had no name, the shop—it was . . .
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Coming Full Circle
We’d been in the air about five minutes when our pilot, Cameron, pointed out the rainbow. It could be viewed, he said, from the right side of the helicopter — my side. I turned my head, knowing just what to expect. Since arriving on Maui a week before . . .
