It is our last, last night in the most beautiful hotel in the whole world.
We have had dinner and we are loafing peacefully in our bedroom, nurturing our sunburn.
This has been caused by overindulgence today.
After our breakfast we thought that we would go and play on the park for a little while: but it was a glorious, bakingly hot Sunday, and lots of other people had thought the same. We had to use our hotel fastpasses to get on a ride without waiting for ages, and after that we thought it was all just too hot and sticky, so we gave up and went back to the hotel.
The hotel has a splendid swimming pool, which was also splendidly empty. It is in a sort of conservatory affair tacked on the back of the building, in the middle of a beautiful garden.
We spent the rest of the day alternately lying on loungers in the garden and diving into the swimming pool.
I have never had the sort of holiday where you do this sort of thing, and I was jolly impressed, I have got to say, I can see exactly why people like it.
As Mark pointed out, it was really only nice because nobody else was there. If it had been the sort of hotel without Disneyland ten yards away from it then the swimming pool would have been bursting with lots of portly people and shrieking children. Instead, all of those people were riding on the Peter Pan Ride, so we could be loud and portly by ourselves, which we were.
It is a brilliant swimming pool, with a jacuzzi so big that we could swim up and down it, which we did, because it was ace. Then we went outside and loafed on vast cushioned sun loungers and listened to the birdsong and breathed in the blossom-scent. If somebody had explained that I was dead and in heaven I would have been surprised but credulous.
Eventually we had to put umbrellas up because we have been in the Lake District for a long time, and our greyish-white flab did not take well to being suddenly scorched.
We were enjoying the easy availability of Vitamin D so much that we ignored this small difficulty, and now we are all as pink as the hotel roof, except Oliver.
Oliver did not go pink because there was a pretty little girl in the swimming pool, and so he ignored the sunshine whilst he showed off his diving abilities and made her laugh and flutter her eyelashes at him. This was fine with us. Oliver is not very tranquil company when you are attempting to become slowly roasted belly pork.
In the end we had to get up, so we had a stroll around the hotel gardens after which we naturally gravitated to the balcony of the cocktail bar. Nobody else was there either.
We sat in the sunshine and laughed and drank beautiful creamy cocktails, and then we ambled back into the park for an almost-last play.
We shot the deadly Zurg, and rode the inter-stellar space shuttle, which is one of my favourites, by the way. C3PO is in charge of it, and we jolly nearly crashed, but it was all right in the end. Then we went for a last hurtle around Thunder Mountain before heading inside for dinner.
It is going to be strange to be eating meals without being visited by giant dogs and pirates. We have become so used to having Rabbit or Tigger or Mickey Mouse bouncing up and wanting to shake our hands that it is going to be oddly quiet when we can eat without being interrupted.
I am absolutely full of admiration for the people who do this for a living. I cannot imagine anything worse than having to go and dance around excitedly in a huge furry costume for half a dozen four year old birthday celebrations a night, followed by bounding from table to table making people feel happy whilst they eat their prawn cocktails.
They are heroes.
