ABOUT THE OWNERS: HOOD RIVER SALT CAVE

Hi there! I'm Angelina, and along with my husband Daniel, we've lived in the Gorge since 2008. Daniel's been windsurfing, and now foiling, in the Gorge since the 1970s. We are so blessed to call it our home.

As an enterprising couple since 1999, we've provided business development, media, marketing and web technology mostly to small business. Our first Hood River waterfront office was behind Pfriems.

Living and working in the Gorge for over seventeen years allowed us to get healthier while we continue to serve others.

We're excited to welcome you to our FROH Wellness Spa and Hood River Salt Cave to help you rejuventate your wellness, body, mind and business while giving back to our local community.

Immigrant, Domestic Violence Survivor, and SBA Awarded Woman in Business Champion for others!

Born in Munchen, Germany, to a seventeen-year-old teenager, when I was three, my stepfather from Guam, a U.S. military soldier, married my mother who worked at the German Patent Office. Their blended German and Guamanian cultures shaped my passion for wellness and innovation with an entrepreneurial spirit.

At thirteen, I immigrated to the United States, arriving at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. At sixteen, inspired by my stepfather’s knack for finding treasure in trash, I’d launched several micro-enterprises over the years to fund my future forward.

After graduating high school in 1983, though I was accepted into Texas A&M’s Veterinary School of Medicine, I pursued education in Business, Broadcast and Media Communications around working in the hospitality industry and going on local modeling, acting and singing auditions.

I was fueled by a desire to help others improve their lives and outcomes through entrepreneurship, wellness, fitness and the arts. Math and science are woven into each of these.

At twenty-three, I launched Angelina’s House as a state-registered home childcare to raise my two children while building financial independence and helping working moms.

In 1990, I founded MOMtrepreneurs, coaching mothers on how to decide, launch and grow their businesses around raising a family. This included personal aesthetic makeovers.

By the early nineties, I had moved to Katy, Texas, and soon after was a praise and worship leader. Launched my Heavenly Help Cleaning & Organizing Business to fund my first Christian Pop Album Give You Rest. My one hit wonder ‘Give You Rest’ is based on Matthew 11:28-30.

A tip for aspiring artists: sending albums to overseas radio stations can fast-track airplay and international recognition.

In 1996, I built on what I had learned about programming in high school to reverse engineer my music website someone else had built so I could update it. This laid the foundation for my eventual web tech journey of almost thirty years now in 2025.

Tearing apart physical objects and then reconstructing them, which my stepdad did often, gave me the confidence to believe most things can be ‘figure-out-able’.

In 1999, at thirty-three, I faced a life-altering challenge, fleeing a domestically violent marriage in Texas with my two children to Washington State. While hiding, I merged my business, media, and communications expertise with my newfound programming skills, co-founding clickLOCAL, later rebranded as Intelligent Netware in the early 2000s.

Through Washington’s WorkFirst program, I secured nine months of funding to pursue web technology training, bypassing traditional vocational paths to rebuild my career.

My multifaceted background converged in San Antonio, where I launched the MOMtrepreneurs radio show on AM 630 KSLR and its MOMtrepreneurs TV show on KHCE-TV 23, managed by TBN.

As an alternative to traditional business networking events, I decided to produce monthly events to converge business, media, marketing and web technology at venues like the Quarry Golf Course and Plaza Club, semi-annual expos at hotels, and a major small business expo, such as the AT&T Center during a Spurs game, for 17,000 ticketholders.

Filming vendors at these events to promote on radio, TV, local magazines like San Antonio Women Magazine (later INSIDE Magazine), and custom-built websites amplified their reach, impact, lead generation, and restored their hope in what did work to market their business.

This innovative approach earned me two U.S. Small Business Administration awards in 2004 through UTSA’s SBDC and the San Antonio SBA office.

Weeks later, an opportunity to appear on The Apprentice Season 3 (“Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts”) was cut short when I was hit from behind by a truck suffering a traumatic brain injury five days before filming. This opportunity would be lost as would being one of the judges on Simon Cowell’s American Inventor’s TV Show the following year.

MOMtrepreneurs Magazine I shut down, and after five episodes The Angelina Show which aired on San Antonio’s Channel 2 PAXTV Network. Gratefully, it ended with a 4.1 Nielsen rating.

Except for a few appearances, and my short lived Believe and Achieve Radio Show, for the next sixteen years I stepped away from the public eye to heal my brain, body, marriage and family.

In 2009, a moved to the Pacific Northwest was a welcome as it resembled the nature I had grown up around in Germany.

Then in 2011, something peculiar happened. Text messages and emails by Texas patients who had been traumatized by those in the health and wellness spaces reached out to me.

I’d design and launch the Beautiful Intelligence experiment to study online consumer vulnerabilities across cities like San Antonio, Dallas, Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, and New York.

Daniel and I had built hundreds of websites, and after a month, new patient requests started coming through on a mass scale where I had to hire a small team to help. After three months, I shut down Beautiful Intelligence, and the insights gained from it fueled the creation, mission and launch of Wellness by Choice in 2012.

The problem: untrust worthy health and wellness practices, practitioners, products and companies were spending more resources on marketing to consumers seeking their help and were harming them, and those who are trustworthy had often been wounded by failed marketing they stopped spending resources on it; therefore, consumers couldn’t find them.

Wellness by Choice, is a hyperlocal curated education-based marketing network of 20,376 websites to introduce trustworthy people, products and services to those seeking them.

In 2018, it was time for Daniel and I to tour full-time, meeting wellness entrepreneurs face-to-face and via Zoom to build trust-based relationships.

In 2019, I started my public comeback through the launch of the Enterprising Women’s Project and Book which I first featured the women in on page 23 in the March Issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. Today, MOMtrepreneurs 2.0 has evolved into the Business Women News Network.

The 2020 lockdown, we spent RVing in Arizona which was a blessing in disguise and offered time to reflect and refine my mission behind my Enterprisng Women’s Projects.

Sadly, January 5, 2021, my son Chris passed at age thirty-one. Fall of 2020, he was confused by pain on his right-side lower back, waiting too long to go the ER and succumb to his symptoms and the hospital system I feel betrayed him, and me.

Today, Wellness by Choice is a multifaceted initiative, uniting vetted experts who share my dedication to education and trust. By curating authentic, human-driven content, we reduce the footprint of scammers and incompetent practitioners, protecting consumers and supporting legitimate businesses.

Driven by passion to educate and empower others to avoid health-related blind spots, like my son Chris experienced, in the summer of 2024 the concept of building a man-made salt cave for physical and psychological wellness was birthed alongside the FROH Wellness Spa.

FROH means ‘happy’, and Frohlich Leben means ‘happy living’ in German.

Our Hood River Salt Cave is now open as I continue to zoom with handpicked entrepreneurs to feature at my 2025 Portland Women’s Expo and WELLx event Oct 18^th, to help educate and empower others on how to live smarter, healthier and happier for 2026. And, the Enterprising Women’s Book, after so many rewrites by those in it, finally will be published in print.

I hope these insights help you understand why I do what I do – the heart and the hope, and most of all the joy behind it.

Angelina (541-340-4606 ;  Angelina@WellnessbyChoice.com)