I love the luxury of unwinding and being pampered in spas. I have been lucky enough to visit them all over the world. I have lost count of the number of times, with just a week to take on the Herculean task of de-stressing, that I’ve googled ‘spa, Europe and lake’. If I had carried out my searches in Lithuanian or Russian (the clientele at my new favourite spa are mostly Russian), I would have come up with Druskininkai. But I didnt, it took a Lithuanian friend coming back to London, relaxed and glowing, to introduce me to this place.

I have been to this, well off the beaten track Lithuanian resort twice now. It took me the whole of the first week long visit to pronounce the name of the spa town with any degree of confidence (Droosk-IN-in-kye, with the emphasis on the second syllable).

I have visited beach resort spas and have nothing against them at all. But in the summer I would rather go short haul, avoid crowded coastlines, swap the babble for babbling brooks, walk in tranquil forests and swim in chanced upon fresh water lakes. Druskininkai ticks all the boxes.

With no Lithuanian and just a smattering of Russian in my vocabulary, in the big hotel in which I stayed on both occasions, its easy to just tune out of the noise and exist almost on a different frequency. En engelsk mand optrådte kortvarigt på min første ophold og jeg var mest skuffet, men han snart gik andetsteds og på min seneste ophold hørte jeg en norsk mand klager højlydt på engelsk, at læger udnævnelsen til sin kone var ubelejligt, da hun havde brug for en time at spise blot en lille del af middag. Men resten af ​​tiden denne lille isoleret gruppe drak rigelige mængder af øl og talte i norsk.

Næste, at komme der, mit hotel Spa Vilnius, den lokale billetpris, og de gode gammeldags europæiske behandlinger