For the final day of my Bavarian trip, I headed to Längenfeld in Austria to spend the day at the Aqua Dome Spa. I was staying overnight in Längenfeld and the guesthouse there was traditional, but also a bit weird. The bedrooms were lovely and mine had a balcony. The Breakfast room was amazing, like an Alpine Mountain Hunting Lodge complete with sheepskin coverings on the seats. There was a stone fireplace and the hosts lit the fire for breakfast, there was an old fashioned radio, a goatherd’s hat and a rather creepy carving of a face in the wood.
There were also lots of witches and wizards around the house, including a life size witch and wizard on the stairs. The family were obviously religious because they also had a Mary and Jesus ornament on a table at the top of the stairs. I didn’t think witchcraft and religion necessarily went well together, but they seemed to happily co-exist at this house. It was a very strange mixture. However, the hosts were very welcoming and keen to make sure I had enjoyed my stay. I actually think it would be a really good destination for a long weekend, because there are loads of hiking trails around. If I’d had longer I would have ventured on some of the hiking trails, there were a couple of impressive waterfalls close by and a swing bridge up in the mountains. I could see it from the levitating bowls in the spa and I could see hikers up there.
As for the Aqua Dome, I had a very enjoyable afternoon and evening there. I liked the system they had where you pay as you leave, so rather than trying to guess how long you’ll stay there and then having to get out before you’re ready or wasting money leaving after 2 hours when you’ve paid for 5 hours, everything just gets put on your locker number, that included my massage, my food and my cocktails! The spa is quite a complex, there are the pools, the saunas, the beauty spa and the hotel. I went in the pools and had a massage, but as I was staying in the Enchanted Guesthouse as I liked to call my bed and breakfast accommodation, I didn’t see the hotel. I also ended up not going in the saunas. They did look interesting, but I think they would have been best enjoyed with company, so I ended up not trying them out. If I do ever go back for a long weekend break, I think the ideal would be to stay at the Enchanted Guesthouse, go hiking in the mountains during the day and then go and relax at the Aqua Dome at night. So I could check out the saunas then.
There were several pools to go in, the warmest indoor one wasn’t huge, but big enough to do a bit of swimming and it was a kid free zone as well, nice to have one kid free pool, especially since they had a dedicated children’s pool anyway. From the indoor pool you could go outdoors and swim along to one of those vortex type pools that you get into and then it pushes you along round in a circle. I did enjoy that. I went to that on about 4 separate occasions. There were 3 levitating bowls and the middle one was by far the hottest and busiest. Unfortunately it was salt water and I have a sensitivity to salt water. Although it wasn’t irritating my skin, I didn’t want to push my luck by staying in there, so I stuck to the upper and lower levitating bowls, which did start to feel a bit cold when you were in them for too long. The top one was a sulphur pool which had a fountain that would spout sulphuric water out of it at timed intervals and the lower one was a massage pool with water jets that would also start at timed intervals. During the day you could see the mountains and the swing bridge, although it was quite misty with low hanging cloud so you didn’t have views of the mountain tops. At night it was lovely because the bowls were lit by mini Olympic torches that went right round, and they were real flames.
There were coloured lights in the water too and they changed colour on a sequence, so it was really pretty. They came round with cocktails to the levitating bowls at night as well, so I had a Blue Lagoon and a Green Moon. They didn’t have a vast amount of alcohol in them. Or maybe they had a normal amount of alcohol in them, but I’d become immune because of the industrial strength cocktails I’d had at the Rattlesnake Saloon. I wasn’t so keen on the fact that when it got to the evening the levitating bowls were full of smooching, snogging couples. If the cocktails had been stronger I wouldn’t have cared! I can understand them making the cocktails fairly weak at the pool though, otherwise the lifeguards would have been busy!
I did go in the children’s pool area to go on the water slide. I’d spotted it outside and decided that I had to try it out. It was mostly being used by kids, but some adults were going on it too. It started out light in the slide and then went dark and then had stars in the tunnel before you came out, thankfully into a shallow pool. I once went on one in the West Edmonton Mall in Canada called the Cannon and it shot you from a height into deep water. So that was the reason it said it was for deep water swimmers only! It was still a bit of a shock. But this was a shallow pool.
My massage was very nice, it was really just a traditional massage, but they used Swiss herbs in the massage oil to make it an Alpine Moonwood massage, just to make it exclusive to the area. All in all it was a good day and I enjoyed the spa a lot. It is a place that would be nice to go back to if I get the opportunity, especially if I can combine it with some mountain hiking.
I think I would have struggled to fit any more in that day after driving from Munich and spending the afternoon and evening in the Aquadome, even though I did have some regrets about not getting to that swing bridge. But I think after all the running around I’d been doing all week in Bavaria, a long soak in hot pools and a relaxing Alpine massage were the perfect end to my holiday.
I travelled in Bavaria and Austria during the second week of May in 2015.
I visited the Aqua Dome Spa in Längenfeld in the Austrian Alps.
I stayed at Ferienhaus Steindl complete with its traditional Alpine breakfast room and all its witches and wizards!
Längenfeld is an approximately two and a half hour drive from Munich.
Read about my other adventures on my trip to Bavaria and Austria.
Paragliding in the Bavarian Alps
Surreal Night at the Rattlesnake Saloon