I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to leave my passport on the kitchen table in Manchester. Discovered this gem at Salzburg Airport, naturally, after a frantic rummage through every pocket and zip compartment of my rucksack. The Ryanair check-in woman had that particular expression, the one that says she has seen every flavour of British incompetence and mine was not even in the top ten. She let me through with my driving licence and a pitying look. I spent the entire coach journey to Carinthia composing elaborate apologies to the owners of Klein St. Paul, certain I would arrive too late and too disorganised to be trusted with a holiday home.

The property sits just outside the village proper, up a lane that my sat-nav pronounced with suspicious confidence. I arrived at half past eight in the evening, which in rural Austria in early autumn means properly dark, the kind of dark that makes you realise how much light pollution you normally live with. The house itself is one of those sturdy wooden chalet affairs, all balconies and flower boxes, and I stood there with my single functioning headtorch, trying to match the key safe code to the booking email while mosquitoes conducted what sounded like a Wagner opera around my ears.

This was when I met my first character. Herr Brenner, the neighbour, emerged from somewhere with a torch of his own that could probably have signalled aircraft. He spoke no English whatsoever and I speak German like a toddler with a head cold, but between his theatrical gestures and my desperate pointing, we established that I was not a burglar, that the key safe was indeed behind the electrical box, and that I had the wrong code entirely because I was reading the booking reference instead of the actual key code. He found this hilarious. I found it less so, but his laughter was so thoroughly infectious that I ended up giggling on a dark Austrian lane with a stranger, which is not how I expected my evening to begin.

He insisted on helping me carry my bags inside, which meant I had to make him tea immediately, which meant discovering that the kitchen had no milk, which meant he produced a flask of something from his jacket and poured us both generous measures. It was homemade pear schnapps and it tasted like being gently hit round the head with a fruit orchard. We sat on his balcony, not mine, because he declared my outdoor furniture "for morning coffee only, not for proper conversation," and he told me about the village in a mixture of German, pointing, and occasional dramatic reenactments.

I learned that Frau Huber at the bakery would give me the stale bread if I arrived after half past seven, unless I asked after her grandson in Klagenfurt, in which case I would get the fresh rolls and possibly a free krapfen. I learned that the swimming lake, which I had imagined as some pristine alpine affair, was apparently full of "the youth" on Saturdays, by which he meant teenagers playing terrible music, and that the proper local swimming happened at six in the morning when the water was "for serious people." I learned that the previous guests in my chalet had been Dutch cyclists who had attempted to barbecue on the balcony and nearly set fire to his rhododendron, a story he told with such vivid arm movements that I genuinely thought he was demonstrating actual flames for a moment.

By the time I stumbled back to my own bed, slightly schnapps-happy and enormously over-informed about local rhododendron maintenance, I realised something. I had arrived convinced that this holiday would be about the scenery, the hiking, the proper Austrian experience of mountains and lakes and perhaps a bit of edelweiss. Instead my first evening had been dominated entirely by a seventy-something man with a powerful torch and strong opinions about balcony furniture, and I could not have been more delighted about it.

The passport mishap, I decided as I drifted off to sleep to the sound of actual cowbells somewhere in the darkness, might have been the best mistake I had made in years.