My wife and I took a 'last hurrah' holiday before our baby's birth

It was with reticence that I started browsing flights to Oman; 3,500 miles felt a little too far away from our midwife as my wife’s pregnancy entered the home straight.

We wanted to go away in late January and, with the baby free to arrive any time from late February, the maths put me on edge. But when Portia said she wanted her last hurrah before the arrival of our firstborn to be spent basking in winter sun, we were forced to look beyond Europe’s chilly borders.

“If the resort is an hour’s drive from the airport, and it takes eight to get from Muscat to London, then an hour to Homerton Hospital, depending on traffic, you might have the baby somewhere over Bosnia and Herzegovina,” I said, pointing at a map. “We’ll have to call it Sarajevo.”

After some worst-case-scenario deliberation, Oman was shelved on account of it being a terrible idea. A first pregnancy is stressful enough without the prospect of a camel-assisted birth on an Arabian roadside.

And so to the Lake District. It may not hold the same exoticism, but it was only a drive away, and I much preferred Keswick as a baby name.

To the uninitiated, this trip was a “babymoon”, a prenatal blowout to cast in stone memories of what it was like to be a breezy, footloose couple before life was changed irreparably by a tiny dependant. At 32 weeks, the baby was unlikely to make an appearance in the Lakes (37 is considered full-term), but there were some chances we were not prepared to take: Portia’s bag of maternity snacks was the first luggage loaded into the car, along with the car seat we’d borrowed from her brother (a legal requirement to be allowed to leave a hospital with a newborn). I googled “M1 hospitals” and made a mental note of the junction numbers, and we were off.

We were bound for Another Place, The Lake, a hotel on the north-west bank of Ullswater, England’s second-largest lake and a ribbon of becalming beauty in the shadow of one of the UK’s most mythical mountains, Helvellyn.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t looked at the forecast for conditions up to its 3,120ft peak (the route via its knifelike Striding Edge is something of a pilgrimage for hill walkers), but as the Lake District plastered itself across our windscreen on the traverse along the A66, Portia revealed why I’d have to conquer its summit another time.

“If you do it, I’m coming,” she said.

“No, Portia, you’re very, very pregnant. It’s one of the most dangerous scrambles in Britain.”

“Yep,” she said.

“Fine. I don’t really want to do it anyway,” I grumbled.

Portia has never been one to put her feet up, and accordingly has found some of the limitations of carrying an increasingly hefty unborn at times frustrating. She has had to stop running, stop cycling and on at least one occasion has sent me off on a hiking trip she would have loved to have been on herself.

In that sense, Another Place was a perfect destination. The hotel sits on the shore of Ullswater, hidden and set back from the road. It prides itself on delivering a sort of ski resort experience away from the Alps, with a focus on balancing activity with relaxation. What’s more, it is an adult hotel with a child-friendly atmosphere.

Though we arrived only as a couple, seeing young kids in and about the communal areas, as well as more than a few other expectant mothers, was comforting, almost exciting. The array of guests at varying stages of familial life provided a sort of parenthood monkey-to-man evolutionary chart. Though very much in the rudimentary stone age, for the time being, we were happy just to have each other’s company. We settled into our room – a light and colourful space replete with a four-poster bed at the front of the hotel, overlooking Ullswater – and freshened up for dinner.

The prospect of sitting across from each other in a restaurant for one of the last such occasions for a long time felt significant. Without conference, we dressed up to effortful levels, enjoying the ceremony of a penultimate date night. But it was the pre-prandial drink in the communal lounge by the fire that carried with it more weight: names.

We’d been putting off the selection of a moniker for our firstborn for weeks, agreeing that we would have a conflab in the Lakes and emerge with a front-runner. As we prepared independently for our showdown, the babymoon started to seem less holiday and more crunch talks, the Potsdam of baby naming. I had taken to keeping schtum on any preferences, knowing that the more Portia thought about any options, the more likely she was to discard them. I was prepared to spring on her my first choice in the delivery room.

I won’t bore you with the details but it worked and we whittled down a list of 15 to three: two for a girl and one for a boy. The next morning, I celebrated by being peer-pressured into taking an early dip in Ullswater.

Another Place is proud of its open-water offering, with a number of instructors on the staff, providing the opportunity for guests to stroll out of the hotel, across the car park, and down to the lake house to don a wetsuit and buoyancy aid for a swim.

The morning was clear and crisp, warming up for unseasonal weather in the Lakes for January (who needs Oman?), and I felt guilty for disrupting the calm of Ullswater, as still as it was quiet; not a single blade of grass seemed to move on Arthur’s Pike, the lake’s looming backdrop.

As it turned out, I didn’t disrupt too much because once in the freezing water, I was so cold I barely made a splash, swimming to the first buoy I could see like a plank of timber.

Portia watched on, initially jealous, then glad, and warm. I admit to being an overly cautious pre-parent, and Portia would have certainly swum the whole lake had I not been there. I told myself I would settle down when the baby was born, when there was something tangible to protect, but until then I made no apologies for my anxiety. On a walk up towards Aira Force, our pregnancy-friendly alternative to Helvellyn, I tried not to gasp at every step Portia took, or issue warning of every glistening rock or snaggable root. “Take your hands out of your pockets!” I told her. We reached the stone bridge over the falls – beloved of William Wordsworth – and stood watching the water tumble over.

Winter looked to have passed early and eager daffodils and snowdrops punctuated the view with colour. We’d heard dozens of people say it was lovely to have a spring baby, but perhaps it was only now, gazing out through shades of green lost to the UK for months, that we understood why.

My daughter was born as the world went into lockdown, on March 21. She is now six months old and I see value in this trip to the Lakes that I maybe did not see then. Not least, the peace and quiet. I can also confirm that the name chosen in front of the fire on that first night managed to stay the course, though it was only agreed upon in the hospital a few minutes after her birth: Ebbi. I can’t wait to take her up Helvellyn.

Another Place (01768 486442) is on the banks of Ullswater, in Cumbria. Double rooms cost from £190 B&B, family suites from £310.