I'd driven from Vienna with the sort of confidence that only comes from having glanced at Google Maps exactly once. Burgenland, I told myself, how hard can it be? It's basically flat. Famous last words. Somewhere outside Eisenstadt I took what I can only describe as an "agricultural detour" and found myself on a dirt track between two sunflower fields, staring at a sign that appeared to say "Burg" but might have said "Berg" or possibly "Biergarten." My phone had given up around the same time I gave up on understanding Austrian road numbering. I was proper lost, sweating through my linen shirt, and beginning to wonder if I'd be sleeping in the hire car between rows of very tall, very judgmental-looking sunflowers.

Then I saw it. Proper fairy-tale stuff. The Burg rose up from the landscape like something from a storybook I'd half-remember from childhood, all pale stone and slightly wonky turrets. I practically wept with relief. I also practically wept when I realised the gravel crunch beneath my tyres was my own doing, and that I'd just announced my arrival with the subtlety of a brass band.

The door opened before I'd even extracted myself from the car. Not by a staff member. By a man in his seventies wearing what I can only describe as "formal gardening attire" - tweed jacket, proper trousers, but also wellies with a small trowel protruding from one. This was Manfred. He was not, he informed me immediately, the owner. He was the neighbour. He was also, he added with some pride, "the one who knows where the key is hidden when Herr Doktor goes to Graz." He said this as though it were a state secret, which perhaps in Burgenland it is.

Manfred insisted on carrying my smallest bag, the one containing only a hairdryer and three novels I wouldn't read. He talked the entire way up the stone steps, mostly about the Doktor's various enthusiasms - wine, obviously, but also something involving bees that I didn't quite follow. "He has theories," Manfred said, in the tone one might use about a beloved but trying relative. "Many theories. You will hear them."

I did hear them. That evening, over a glass of Blaufrankisch that the Doktor himself produced from somewhere beneath the stairs, I heard about the bees, the local soil composition, and why the sunflowers I'd got lost among were, quote, "not the good ones." The Doktor was perhaps sixty, with the weathered hands of someone who actually does things rather than merely theorising about them, and the slightly manic energy of a man who rarely meets anyone new to tell about his bees. His wife, Liesl, appeared periodically to correct his more extravagant claims. "The honey was not *internationally* recognised," she said firmly, pouring me another glass. "It was mentioned. In a newsletter."

Dinner that night happened because Manfred had mentioned to Liesl that I looked "peaky," a diagnosis that apparently required immediate feeding. I found myself at a long table with the Doktor and Liesl, Manfred and his wife Hilda, and a woman called Greta who arrived without explanation and spent the entire meal arguing with Manfred about something that happened in 1987 involving a boundary fence. I understood perhaps forty percent of the conversation, which was in a rapid dialect that even my school German couldn't parse, but I laughed when they laughed and looked concerned when they looked concerned, and somehow this passed for participation.

Greta, I gathered, was some sort of cousin. Or neighbour. Or possibly both - the relationships in Burgenland seemed to operate on principles I couldn't quite grasp. She had opinions about my car, my shoes, and my unmarried state, which she delivered with the cheerful directness of someone who has known everyone in a thirty-kilometre radius since birth and sees no reason to pretend otherwise. "You need feeding up," she announced, pushing another slice of something unidentifiable but delicious toward me. "And better directions."

I admitted the directions. This caused great hilarity, and a twenty-minute discussion of my various wrong turns that made me sound like the village idiot. Manfred produced a hand-drawn map on a napkin, which Hilda immediately corrected. Liesl produced a proper map, which Greta dismissed as "new and wrong." The Doktor suggested I simply learn the stars, which he claimed to have done as a boy, though Liesl muttered something about him getting lost in his own vineyard as recently as last autumn.

By the time I stumbled up to my room - a magnificent high-ceilinged affair with a bed like a small country and windows that actually opened with that satisfying heavy thunk of old craftsmanship - I felt less like a paying guest and more like someone who'd accidentally joined a family. A slightly eccentric, argumentative, wine-obsessed family who would definitely remember my wrong turns for the next decade, but a family nonetheless.

I lay in the darkness, listening to absolute silence except for the occasional distant comment from Greta, who seemed to be leaving. "Tell the English girl about the lake," I heard her say. "She's the sort who gets lost. She'll need it."

I smiled into my ridiculous pillows. Tomorrow, I suspected, there would be more characters. More opinions. More food I hadn't requested and wine I couldn't refuse. And probably, given my track record, more getting lost. But for the first time in a long while, that prospect felt less like a mishap and more like an invitation.