When we were here nine years ago with our friend Sheila we took a wonderful walk based on a walking route provided by the hotel - on a piece of paper! Imagine doing that these days? Instead I’ve already planned our walking routes for both days using the wonders of the Odnance Survey app.
Before that breakfast turns out to be, in some ways, almost as haphazard as last night’s dinner - this time mostly from a social distancing perspective, We are seated closer to other tables, the staff continue serving without masks, diners fail to adhere to the one-way system. Happily we’re relaxed about all this and we enjoy fruit plate, yoghurt and berry compote and an excellent “full English” including dubble black pudding for me (because I get Hubby’s too!) and very good coffee.
Then it’s back to the room to dress down for our walk - I can’t go to breakfast in skimpy shorts can I? We’re on the road for 10:00 heading north passing through the next village and then out into open country. All around is beautiful gently rolling hills and lovely views across fields to other villages, hamlets, homes and farms in yellow stone It’s truly the most picturesque experience.
The dilemma is that I can post a hundred beautiful houses and still not use all the opportunities, so after a while I calm down and just drink in the beauty, although some I just can’t resist. Soon we’re at the destination of Northleach, quite a large village in these parts and pop into Bugens to get water, but are swayed by ice cream and even worse, two lovely looking iced Danish pastries that were sat there screaming ‘buy me’ right by the till. So we did.
Our lovely walk took us back south from Northleach slowly heading back to the Swan, again passing through glorious countryside. The walk tallies in at 15.8 miles so we feel as though a shandy reward is called for, and in our island-garden we relax, read the paper (yes the village store / trout farm has a token single Guardian, which we snap up each day so far) and work on photos t9 upload.
Before long it’s time to shower and dress for dinner, earlier than normal as we have drinking date with friends, so return to the island with a bottle of Chardonnay and the big iPad so we can FaceTime our friends in Sheffield for an hour’s chat before dinner.
The menu still shows numerous items we know are not available ~ chateaubriand, sirloin and lamb at least - so we just ask “what can we have?” instead. The boy offers local trout (literally - it’s 50 yards across the road to the farm) followed by duck breast and confit, all of which sounds perfect so we don’t even check for alternatives. True to form, chef delivers excellent food and we are very unhappy, unlike every table around us who seem to be making quite a storm out of the situation, which we now understand to be supplier related - after four months, all the pubs and hotels in the country are demanding stock and in this very rural area it’s proving impossible to get it fast enough to satisfy demand. We are impressed with how the hotel is coping with both these issues and the ensuing grumpy customers (not us!) we finish with cheese and pudding and appropriate wines to match.
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