I have never been so relieved to see a compost bin in my entire life. After five hours of driving from Graz airport, two wrong turns involving what I am fairly certain was the same confused cow, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted our holiday cottage was located inside a river, we finally spotted the wooden sign for AST030 tucked between pine trees on a lane just outside Schladming.

The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap. Somewhere near Leoben I had announced with great authority that I would handle the final navigation stretch, waving my phone about like a compass in a period drama. "Left at the bakery," I declared. There was no left. There was a bakery, admittedly, but it sat on a roundabout with no left turn permitted, and my left took us onto a farm track where a very large dog expressed its opinions about our rental Volvo. My partner drove in silence for twenty minutes. The children found this hilarious, which helped nobody.

But then the cottage appeared, and something in my chest unclenched. It is one of those proper Austrian wooden houses, all dark timber and flower boxes, with a balcony that looks directly towards the Dachstein mountains. I stood in the gravel driveway with my rucksack still half-zipped, just staring. The air smelled of pine and woodsmoke and something faintly of cow, which I chose to interpret as authentic.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though getting it out required a torch, reading glasses, and a degree of patience I do not naturally possess. My youngest filmed this on her phone. I will not be viewing that footage. Inside, the place had that particular holiday cottage smell of clean linen and slightly ancient sofa, instantly familiar to anyone raised on British self-catering. The kitchen was compact but organised, with a coffee machine I immediately claimed as my project for the week. The living area had a wood-burning stove stacked with ready-cut logs, which struck me as dangerously inviting for someone with my pyromaniac tendencies.

I must mention the balcony again because it became our headquarters within minutes. The children dragged plastic chairs outside despite the evening chill, and we sat there with supermarket biscuits and terrible instant coffee, watching the last light fade behind the mountains. Nobody mentioned the sat nav. Nobody mentioned my navigation failure. We just sat there in our jumpers, slightly stunned to have arrived anywhere at all.

The bathroom revealed a proper Austrian touch: a heated towel rail already warm, and a shower with approximately seventeen settings, none of which I could operate without flooding something. I selected what I believed was "gentle rainfall" and received something closer to "agricultural pressure washer." My hair looked interesting for dinner.

Speaking of dinner, we had brought pasta and sauce from a Spar in Liezen, operating on that particular holiday logic where you buy ingredients for meals you will never actually cook. The kitchen hobs worked with satisfying efficiency, and we ate at the wooden table with the balcony doors open, letting in mountain air that felt almost embarrassingly clean compared to what we breathe at home.

By nine o'clock, the children were somehow still awake, hyped on altitude and novelty. My partner and I took turns carrying bedding upstairs to the loft bedroom, cracking our heads on the sloped ceiling in a ritual that would become familiar. The beds were firm in that deeply Austrian way that suggests proper sleep rather than mere rest.

I lay there later, listening to unfamiliar silence broken only by my daughter's whispered commentary on the stars visible through the skylight, and thought about how thoroughly I had failed at navigation that afternoon. How completely I had misread a simple road. And yet here we were, in this wooden house in Styria, with mountains outside and my family somehow still speaking to me. Sometimes the wrong turns deliver you exactly where you need to be. Though I will not be telling the sat nav that. It knows too much already.