An oddly pleasant hot spring an hour west of Phoenix.

Janet and I left Quartzsite on the Wednesday after Tyson Wells Sell-A-Rama show in Quartzsite ended. She was headed for a ranch near Wickenburg where she’s based with her significant other and their horses during the winter months. I was headed for a friend’s house in Laveen, AZ. But first, we’d make one overnight stop: El Dorado Hot Springs in Tonopah, AZ.

We’d heard about El Dorado from a mutual artist friend who really loved the place. I’d tried to research it on the Internet and found a website so messed up that I couldn’t get much information. But I wasn’t in a hurry to get where I was going and neither was she. We figured that it would be nice to soak off the dust of Quartzsite — well, at least I figured that — and this hot spring was on the way.

I’ll start by saying this: it’s a weird place. Located just south of I-10, it has several electric and water hookup sites, as well as some overflow sites, which is where we ended up. The place has peacocks and a very large pig roaming around. There are two kinds of tubs: the big public tub, which you can use as much as you like when you pay for a campsite, or a private tub, which you must reserve and can only use for an hour. The catch: clothing is not allowed in the public tub.

I’m shy and the idea of soaking in a hot tub, naked, with strangers, was not very appealing. So we opted for the private tub and got a 7 PM time slot.

It was dark when we made our way to the tub. It was in a little fenced in area with two lounge chairs and some mellow lights along the top of the fence. The tub itself was made of stone and concrete with lots of embedded agate slabs along the top. The water came out of a pipe and down a little rock waterfall. The tub itself was big enough for 6 or 8 people — certainly plenty large for the two of us.

I can’t begin to tell you how pleasant it was to soak in a hot tub under a star-studded Arizona sky. The water wasn’t hot; it was about body temperature. Very pleasant for long-term soaking. Indeed, we stayed in the water for nearly the full hour.

It was so good that we signed up and paid for another soak the next morning. That’s when I got this photo of our tub.

One of the private hot tubs at El Dorado.

The place isn’t perfect. There are more than the average number of flies in the camping area and if the wind is blowing just wrong, you can smell the Hickman’s egg farm less than a mile to the west. But it’s mellow and laid back; a nice place for an overnight visit.