Ofuro "Japanese Hot Tub"

I have been taking a class on line and last night one of the assignments or homework you could pick was “bath tea” to add to our hot bath.

So I scuttled myself to my herb cabinet and made the “tea”. I brought 1 and 1/2 quarts of water to a simmer, added 2 cups dried herbs (I had lavender and chamomile) took it off the stove and let it steep for 20 minutes. Then I strained it and dumped it into hubby’s bath.

It also called for Epsom salts which I forgot this time.

John has been taking hot baths for quite awhile now because of his pain and neuropathy. John has a long history of hot baths having grown up in Taiwan as well as our 8 years of living in Japan. They have it right over there.

We kind of got to be tub snobs having been in Japan as their tubs are designed to be deep so that you can be happily immersed up to your neck. The way they are designed here is likened to taking a bath in a puddle.

Which brings us to the second wonderful thing about the oriental bathing habit. Never, and I mean never take your relaxing soak in the same water you wash in. Euuuuuuu. Get yourself all clean and then get in. John demonstrates this in one of our blog posts.CLICK HERE.

Okay , so the problem of the tub. Well I don’t know who designed the one in our house but …..I don’t want to go there.

So we put our heads together and ta da..went to fleet farm and bought ourselves a stock tank. It’s the plastic rubber made kind. We actually have two. The big one didn’t fit in our inside tub area so we got a tad smaller one. But it’s the depth we wanted the most so they are both fully functional deep pools of relaxation stations.

The reason we use these instead of a regular hot tub is they use less water so we can empty them out each day. Instead of having to use chemicals, stop mold, and all the other maintenance that comes with a hot tub. As you can see from the above linked video, we do have one hot tub which we use for collecting rain water and keeping our gold fish in. (The fish are there to eat the mosquito larva and poop to fertilize the water for our garden.)

Mary also has a A fun video of her singing and the Frugal Prosumer Hot Tub CLICK HERE.

So here are the pics: