I have never been so relieved to see a compost bin in my entire life. There we were, three hours after leaving Graz Airport, winding through the Salzkammergut hills with me convinced I had booked us into a lakeside paradise, when my partner calmly pointed out that I had in fact been navigating us toward a farm shop near Liezen for the past twenty minutes. The sat nav had given up on me around the third unmarked junction, and my phone, now clinging to two percent battery, was showing a property in Altaussee that appeared to be floating somewhere in the middle of a forest.

The mishap, if we are being generous with the word, involved a very enthusiastic left turn onto what I shall generously call a logging track, followed by the realisation that our hire car's undercarriage was not designed for Austrian forestry. We reversed in what I can only describe as a seventeen-point turn, during which I may have suggested we simply abandon the vehicle and start a new life as mountain herders. My partner, ever practical, reminded me that we had paid the cleaning deposit.

When we finally found the actual property, tucked among the trees above Lake Altaussee, I was in that peculiar state of travel delirium where everything either seems magical or deeply suspicious. The wooden chalet sat there looking impossibly picturesque, all dark timber and flower boxes, while I stood in the gravel drive clutching a key safe code written on a crumpled receipt from Stansted Airport Pret. The mountains rose behind it in that slightly show-offy way that Austrian scenery has, all jagged green and distant snow, and I remember thinking that if this was the wrong house, I was simply going to move in anyway and hope the owners were sympathetic.

The key safe was, naturally, on the far side of the building, which meant a slightly undignified scramble past what I later learned was the woodshed but initially assumed was some kind of rustic outdoor toilet. I dropped the code twice. The second time it fell into a patch of something that looked suspiciously like wild garlic, and I spent a good minute on my knees in the dusk, wondering whether this was how my holiday would begin: foraging for digits while my partner made that particular face she makes when I have, once again, turned a straightforward situation into minor theatre.

The door opened with that satisfying clunk of solid Austrian engineering, and we stepped into warmth and the smell of pine. I am not normally someone who notices smells, being more of a visual chaos person, but the interior hit me immediately: clean, wooden, slightly lemon-polished, with those enormous windows that frame the lake like a painting someone has thoughtfully hung for you. I had planned to be nonchalant, to wander in casually and perhaps make a wry comment about the journey, but instead I stood in the hallway making small involuntary noises while my partner brought in the bags I had abandoned in my rush to confirm we were not, in fact, trespassing.

The kitchen was one of those proper Alpine affairs where everything has its place and the knives actually cut things, a revelation after our flat in London where the bread knife has been ceremonial since 2019. I opened the fridge out of pure nosiness and found it empty but spotless, which somehow felt like both a challenge and a promise. We had brought supplies from a Spar in Bad Aussee, mainly bread and cheese and a bottle of something local that I had selected based entirely on the label featuring a cheerful-looking goat.

By the time we had made our slightly pathetic first meal, perched on stools at the kitchen counter because we were too tired to work out the outdoor furniture, the mishaps of the journey had already started to feel like necessary preamble. The wrong turn, the logging track, the key safe drama: they had earned us this particular moment, watching the last light fade over the lake through glass that seemed almost insultingly large, as if the house were showing off its view to newcomers who had not yet earned it.

I woke at dawn, which has never happened before and will likely never happen again, confused by the silence and the strange angle of mountain light across the bedroom ceiling. For one disorienting moment I thought we had slept in a furniture showroom. Then I remembered: Altaussee, Styria, the wrong turn that had somehow become right. I padded downstairs in socks, made coffee with the machine I had figured out the night before through a combination of guesswork and Austrian diagrams, and stood at the window watching mist lift off the lake like something being slowly unwrapped.

The compost bin, when I finally located it properly that morning, became a small symbol of my arrival competence. I had found something. I had, against modest odds, arrived somewhere deliberate, somewhere that smelled of pine and possibility, somewhere the sat nav had not entirely defeated me.