This has been my view for the whole afternoon.

It’s been bliss to recharge with a back, neck and shoulder massage followed by my first ever pedicure. I did not realise anyone could spend so long looking at my feet. Hopefully my feet have appreciated it and behave like new versions of themselves tomorrow. Alternatively, I discover that it was better to have feet shaped like the inside of my trainers after all.

We’ve done very little in terms of moving anywhere today, which is generally a feature of this whole trip unfortunately. The thin line we walk north to south we cover extremely diligently; anything laterally of that, not so much. So despite having a brief tour of Cartmel in the taxi last night, we have not seen anything outside of the hotel today. Which is a shame as Cartmel is not only the spiritual and potentially factual (there are three claims) home of sticky toffee pudding, it also has 5 pubs for a permanent population of only 400 people. That’s our kind of place, putting a lot of remote Scottish villages to shame.

We, however, have spent the morning replotting our route for the next two days to avoid main A roads without pavements. Inevitably, tomorrow is now a long day. I’ve also packaged up my tiny Perilla plant to send home, which is the gift everyone gets at L’Enclume at the end of the meal. This is lovely, but also moderately reckless, given that our taxi driver commented on how many people fly in just to come to this restaurant. International foodies are not going to get a member of the mint family back through airport security are they? I once had my carry-on sent to the naughty corner past the x-ray machine as my gym kit came up as “organic matter” on the scan. The little organic pot of soil harbouring 4 little plant leaves hasn’t got a hope against TSA. I would say that the best gift we’ve had from a swanky restaurant was home brewed beer bottles from Geranium in Copenhagen, but those didn’t get past customs either.

Finally we also ordered a supermarket delivery to our next rest stop to avoid Mark’s mum from having to do a load of shopping for us. I can’t wait to see what gets substituted for what we have actually ordered.

So with all of that to organise, we could have done without dinner shenanigans, but we have discovered dinner shenanigans are either a normal post COVID thing where no one bothers training staff any more or a hotel that doesn’t-have-a-lot-guests thing. I ordered miso marinated cod with soba noodles and when it arrived having been nowhere near any miso and with rice vermicelli glass noodles I did ask the waiter what was going on. Without a word, she whisked it away, to reappear (once Mark had finished his main course) with ribbon egg noodles and still no miso marinating. I still don’t understand why the option didn’t include “I’m sorry, we don’t have miso or soba noodles, I have no clue why we have this on the menu, what would you prefer instead?” At least that would be honest.

This is the second time on this trip I have tried to eat soba noodles, but have been denied the pleasure, so I’m beginning to think it’s me: maybe I have a natural ability to repel soba noodles. I can’t think of any circumstance where this will be remotely useful, but if that happens, you will be the first to know, I promise. 

Anyway, that palaver was all the excuse I needed to test the sticky toffee pudding here, which was pretty good. No, I have no idea what the wafer thing is for, in the middle, either.

We are now one Minions film on the laptop and a chilled glass of white wine away from a good night’s sleep and a 20 mile /32km walk tomorrow. Perfect combination……..

Distance – absolutely zero