...speaking of calming experiences, there were many for me when I was travelling around BC. in this particular circumstance, we were travelling around, heading towards a music festival near Nelson, and we headed through this area that was known for having hot springs. we found some stupid resort that had hot springs in the title, but discovered they didn't actually have any. then we looked in local brochures and found no hot springs that wouldn't cost us a bunch of money to experience. eventually we got word of some hot springs along the highway somewhere, that people had just recently discovered. i forget exactly how we got the information, and how we found the place, but we found it, and this is what it looked like:





there was a forest, that was inclined, that led down to this river, or stream. as you can see in the one photo, there was an awesome waterfall. there were these neat cave-like things that the moving water had created, and since the water level was low, you could get inside them, and some had no water. one of the friends i was with had a digereedoo, and he was playing it inside one of these caves. it made a very cool sound.
the water was freezing! i was wading through it quite a bit to get some photos. this place was very picturesque. however, as cold as the water was, it was awesome, because at the sides of the river, if you dug down deep into the pebbles, and sand that was on the edge, hot water would start to fill the hole that you dug. when we arrived there, there was already some little hot-tubs made, and so we took advantage of them, and also made some of our own. it was really fun to go from the extremely cold water, to the hot water.
There were some people there when we got there, but they eventually left, so we had this spot to ourselves, and camped in the woods overnight. up the river a while, apparently there was a more populated hot spring, where people had created some sort of pump to bring up the hot water at a faster rate, and they had made tubs out of wood and stuff. we didn't really feel like going there though. we had found our little utopia in the woods.