Announcing the sale of Waddow Hall activity centre to GT Foundation, a UK registered and locally based charity.

Baden-Baden is a well-known spa town. It's almost the ubiquitous spa town. Does it do anything else? Does it have any other claim to fame? So when I started writing my Bath Book, a travelogue of some kind about hot water, steam and bathing culture, Baden-Baden was the first place to come to mind. But the golden age of spas is some years past now.

In the last four posts, I've talked about the four spas I visited on my train adventure around Germany's UNESCO Great European Spa Towns and now it's time to talk about the journeys between them - because visiting those four spas required thirteen trains, four buses and three trips to Frankfurt. A few years ago, Germany's rail network would have come firmly under the heading of “Examples of Great German Efficiency”.

The last of the four spas I visited on my Great German Spa Towns trip and let's get the spoiler out of the way early - it was probably my favourite. Bad Ems is a tiny place that doesn't instinctively feel like the place to put an interesting spa with a unique feature but it is on Unesco's list of Great European Spa Towns, so I guess it's not wholly unreasonable.

Next on the Great German Spa Towns adventure is KissSalis, in Bad Kissingen. So far I've been to Baden-Baden's Caracalla Therme, which sits on the spa/waterpark borderline, and Friedrichsbad, which is as close to Roman as you're going to find in 2025. And now, after a bus, three trains and a stroll, I made it to the next Great European Spa Town and the next spa.

When I went to Baden-Baden, I was expecting the famous spa town to be a bit like Budapest, in that it would have a different spa on every street corner and I'd need to spend at least three or four days to work through a good selection, so I was quite disappointed to find there were only two. I spend Friday afternoon & evening in Caracalla, which is the bigger and more extensive.

It's time to start the German Spa Town adventure posts! I'm going to do the spas themselves first and then the journey and then the towns and so first up is Baden-Baden's Caracalla Therme. Caracalla Therme opened in 1985 although you'd think it's under a decade old - it doesn't look like it's about to celebrate its 40th birthday. It's a glass building right next to the 1877 Friedrichsbad, which makes them very handy to visit as a pair, and the main pool is housed in the circular bit sticking out of the building further up in the park.

What does a travel blogger wear? Well, if you're looking at Instagram, a lot of very impractical long colourful dresses, yellow waterproofs especially against grey-green backgrounds and probably Teva foam sandals. Bikinis as often as possible. Clothes that make them look really good. Oh, and things that can be affiliate-linked for profit, obviously. I dress mostly for practicality. I'm never going to wear a dress longer than ankle-length because if I can fall over it on the stairs, I'm going to fall off the mountain.

This is usually either the first or the second post of the year but here we are in the last week of February because I had the bright idea to document our Christmas Adventure on film this year. I'm not very good at taking 36 film photos in a single day, so it took until mid-February to use it all up and then another 10 days to get the pictures back.