Spa getaway makes Mother's Day special
After a lifetime nurturing her daughter, mom gets her turn at the Mayflower
'I don't like gym shoes -- especially white ones." This declaration came from my mom after I insisted she pack a pair for our mother-daughter trip. "They make my feet look like cruise ships," she added.
I took a deep breath and told myself to be patient; this woman potty-trained me.
As an early Mother's Day treat, I was taking Mom to the Mayflower Inn & Spa in Connecticut's bucolic Litchfield Hills. For three days, we'd work out, eat healthy and load up on spa treatments -- concepts decidedly foreign to my mom, a woman who managed to spend more than six decades on this planet without ever having had a massage. (That should be illegal.)
We were headed to a place that's been voted the country's No. 1 destination spa by Conde Nast Traveler readers. So on the spa spectrum, Mom was starting at the very top. It was like teaching a toddler to walk on Everest's Khumbu Icefall.
With a new pair of non-white gym shoes in her suitcase, Mom and I pulled up to the Mayflower on a chilly day in March, too early for spring flowers and too late for fluffy snow. It may have been the ugliest time of year, but the place still sparkled, kind of like Gisele Bundchen first thing in the morning: bed head, no makeup, but still better looking than 99 percent of the population.
Surrounded by 58 rolling acres of manicured gardens, the intimate inn looks more like a country manor, covered in quintessentially New England cedar shingles. Oil paintings, fireplaces and four-poster beds give the inn a rich, old-money vibe. But to me, the brightest star in the Mayflower galaxy also is the newest: a 20,000-square-foot spa.
The Spa House, as it's called, was designed by the mother-daughter team of Adriana Mnuchin, the Mayflower's former owner, and her daughter, Lisa Hedley, who stayed on as creative director. Decked out in a creamy blue and white color scheme, this bastion of serenity opened in 2006. It quickly became a hit with harried Manhattan couples happy to make the 90-minute drive from the city for a weekend of luxurious decompression in Washington, Conn., a town that doesn't get cell phone reception -- on purpose.
During the week, women make up the main clientele. They sign up for indulgent, all-inclusive packages consisting of spa-cuisine meals, plush lodging and unlimited access to as many mind-body classes and spa services as they can squeeze in.
The Spa House is the kind of place where you can spend the entire day getting kneaded, wrapped or scrubbed in one of the nine treatment rooms, working on your swim stroke at the pool, limbering up in the airy yoga studio, and vegging out with a cup of tea in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the backyard pond. It's pretty impressive, even for seasoned spa junkies like myself. For mom, well, she looked as happy as I probably did the first time she took me to Disney World.
"I could live here," she said, as we sat in our robes in the garden room, waiting for our therapists to fetch us for our first treatment -- that's my first treatment of the day, and Mom's first treatment of her life.
Spa director Helen Brown had put together a schedule of treatments and classes customized to us. She threw Mom right in there, starting her off with a massage.
"Now you're sure I won't have a man for this?" Mom asked nervously. For the fifth or sixth time.
"Yessss," I said, exasperated. "We requested a female therapist, remember?"
Apparently someone didn't remember, because a man appeared, asking for my mother. I quickly pulled him aside while my mom silently panicked. Crisis averted: In no time, a smiling female therapist showed up to whisk mom away. I felt like an anxious parent dropping off her kid the first day of school.
Over an hour later, Mom and I met back in the garden room. She had that blissed out, "I've just had a massage" expression on her face.
"I thought it was going to be chop, chop, chop," she said, making a Mr. Miyagi motion with her hands. No wonder the woman had never had a massage until now. "I'm hooked," she said.
It turned out to be the first of many firsts Mom had at the Mayflower. In the dining room that night, Mom had her first edamame. That's not so unusual, but I was a little shocked when she confessed to eating her first brussels sprout.
She also tried yoga and pilates for the first time. Clearly inspired, she offered to break in her new gym shoes on an afternoon hike through the nearby hills.
My mom? Initiating a hike? I would have been less shocked if she suggested slamming a few Jack Daniel's shots before taking a spin on a couple of Harleys.
As we walked through the woods, I made the mistake of mentioning that bears live in this part of Connecticut. She spent the rest of the hike convinced we were going to get mauled, while I bit my tongue and tried to remind myself, once again, that she's the reason I no longer wear diapers.
Despite her fear of imminent death, she enjoyed our trek -- and her gym shoes.
Hiking, massage, brussels sprouts. I'd done all that before, many times. But there was something special about watching my mother experience it all for the first time, at the Mayflower -- an apt name for a place that introduced Mom to a whole new world.