We had a great camping spot on the river last night. There’s snow on the ground here, but not too much to be a bother. Most places are closed in the winter, but we are nice and the caretaker of the Pagosa Riverside Campground let us camp there anyway.
We had a great day being lazy and enjoying the springs.
It was beautiful setting on the river, that you can’t argue with. But to show a big picture of a giant pool, that ended up being a pond that you weren’t allowed to swim in as your main picture was a total switcheroo. That photographer is making them a lot of money.
We left for a bit in the middle of the day to go get lunch and walk around town. We had driven by and were curious what these geodesic domes were so we went to check them out.
It’s this great little geo thermal greenhouse where research is done, 5th graders learning lab, and they also sell their produce to the community on a donation basis. They use naturally heated groundwater (geo thermal ) Used which is not suitable for growing to heat tapwater through a heat exchanger in a geodesic dome to heat a large pool they used as a thermal heat sink to keep the ambient temperature roughly the same all the time irrespective of season. www.pagosagreen.org
We went back for the afternoon/evening. That’s when it’s especially nice seeing the steam rising from the hot pools.
Not sure if just because I was really looking forward to it or the advertisements of the springs were amazing, but the Springs at Pagosa was NOT a 4/5 star facility as advertised.
And we were all so looking forward to the showers. Mine was luke warm/cold and the men’s locker room was a makeshift thing outside. Edwin said (after he anticipated my unhappiness) because he himself took a shower in what he called a “makeshift garden shed”.
It was a great day, but I did my share of complaining…not because I was having a bad day or that it wasn’t a nice place, but they advertised it as a super fancy and nice, showing a big pool etc… and it did not live up to it…at least not for me, nor the kids. Because it was a lot of hot tub pools and not somewhere “fun” for the kids to play. But really if it didn’t advertise as such, and charge like a fancy place I would not of been bummed. The locker room situation was ridiculous. If it’s advertised as a nice spa place, it SHOULD at least have nice locker rooms. And I’m not the pickiest… but it’s a problem if at the end I would’ve preferred to take a shower in the RV.
The RV shower isn’t bad actually. It’s roomy enough. Good water pressure. And it gets hot. The 2 issues are the water is constantly changing temperature so as the hot water runs out it gets cold for a minute before it warms up again. Which that is minor to the biggest problem if RV showers is to conserve water it’s always…turn water on to get wet, turn of to suds up, turn back on to rinse off, repeat etc…so basically it’s a luxury to have running water at your preferred temperature for the entire duration of a shower.