The week was long.
The days after it don’t have to be.

A natural hot spring is groundwater that has been heated underground, usually by proximity to volcanic rock, and has picked up dissolved minerals on the way back up. What it picks up depends entirely on the rock. Saturnia’s water is sulphurous, which is why it smells the way it does and why silver jewellery should stay in the room. Calistoga’s is drawn from a geothermal field beneath the valley floor and has been used for bathing since the 1860s.

Iceland’s Blue Lagoon is a different thing again, and worth being clear about: the lagoon is man-made, fed by seawater that has passed through the Svartsengi geothermal plant, and it is rich in silica, which is what gives it the opaque milk-blue colour and leaves hair feeling like straw for a day.

As for what it does: warm immersion reliably relaxes muscle, eases stiff joints for a while, and helps most people sleep. It is not a treatment for a medical condition, and we will not tell you it is. If a spring is hot — anything much above 40°C — the sensible pattern is twenty minutes in, cool off, drink water, go back.

Most group wellness trips fail in the same way. One person builds an itinerary out of love, everyone agrees to it in the group chat, and by day two half the party is doing things they did not want to do because saying so feels ungrateful.

The fix is not a better itinerary. It is fewer fixed points and an agreement, out loud, before anyone travels, that skipping something is normal. We suggest one anchor a day that everybody attends — usually a meal — and treat everything else as an open invitation.

It helps to tell us the awkward things early: who is pregnant, who is recovering from surgery, who cannot afford the treatment everyone else is having, who needs a room to themselves to be civil at breakfast. None of that is difficult to plan around. It is only difficult to retrofit.

Ask anyone what they remember from a trip like this and you will rarely hear about the treatment they booked. You hear about the second soak, at four, when the crowd had gone. The walk to nowhere in particular. The hour on a balcony when the conversation finally got past work.

None of those can be scheduled. They can only be made possible, by leaving a hole in the day big enough for them to happen in. That is the whole argument, and it is why our plans look thin next to a resort brochure.

It also takes a day. Most people spend the first twenty-four hours still running at the speed they arrived at — checking email, proposing activities, apologising for resting. Three nights is usually the minimum for that to wear off. Two nights is a nice weekend; it is not a rest.