I have never been so grateful for a thermos of tea in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once attended a wedding in Middlesbrough in November. The drive to Rennweg am Katschberg had been going so well, you see. My partner and I had set off from Salzburg Airport in our hire car, full of that particular optimism that only a British person abroad can muster, convinced that Austrian weather would somehow be more cooperative than the drizzle we had left behind in Luton.

How wrong we were.

The mishap came precisely eleven miles from our destination, at a petrol station where I confidently filled our diesel car with petrol. I blame the signage, naturally. My partner blames my fundamental inability to read anything in a language that features quite so many umlauts. Three hours, one very expensive drainage call-out, and what I can only describe as a meaningful silence later, we finally crawled up to our holiday home as darkness fell and the first proper snow of the season began to descend.

I stepped out of the car and immediately sank to my knee in something that was definitely not the light dusting mentioned in the weather forecast. The air smelled of pine and something else, something I would later identify as my own hubris. Here we were, two people who considered themselves reasonably experienced walkers, who owned proper boots and everything, completely undone by Austrian snow and my own petrol-based incompetence.

Morning brought clarity and, mercifully, a local man named Klaus who explained that yes, the Katschberg region was marvellous for walking, but perhaps not today, unless we fancied ourselves as polar explorers. The weather had turned properly vicious overnight, with winds that made our little terrace house creak in a way that suggested structural commentary. We stood at our window with our tea, watching what should have been panoramic mountain views reduced to approximately fifteen feet of swirling white.

Being British, we refused to be defeated by mere meteorology.

We layered up like onions with anxiety issues and set out for what Klaus called a "gentle woodland stroll" near the village. Within twenty minutes, my supposedly waterproof trousers had surrendered to the wet. My partner's expensive hiking socks, purchased from a specialist shop in Keswick, had begun a slow betrayal. We squelched along a path that kept disappearing under fresh falls, arguing good-naturedly about whether this constituted an adventure or simply poor planning.

The turning point came when we reached a clearing where the wind had sculpted the snow into something almost architectural. We stopped, properly stopped, and listened. The silence was absolute, broken only by my own breathing and the faint, embarrassing rustle of my inadequate clothing. For a moment, the weather did not matter. We were standing in something genuinely extraordinary, and we had got there under our own steam, petrol mishap and all.

The walk back was quicker, mostly because we were both developing what I can only describe as a profound respect for hypothermia. We passed other walkers, Austrians mostly, who nodded at us with the particular expression of people who have noticed our jeans and inadequate gloves and decided we are either very brave or very stupid.

We spent the evening drying everything before our wood-burning stove, drinking something warm and alcoholic that Klaus had recommended, and admitting to each other that perhaps we had slightly underestimated Alpine weather in late autumn. There would be other walks, we promised ourselves, ones where we might actually see the mountains rather than simply infer their existence from the direction of the wind.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of snow against the window, already planning tomorrow's route, already knowing we would probably get it wrong again in some new and exciting way. Some holidays are about getting things right. This one, I suspected, was going to be about getting things wrong in very beautiful places.