I have never been so relieved to see a compost bin in my entire life. There we were, three hours into our drive from Graz Airport, winding through the sort of Styrian countryside that makes you want to buy a smallholding and start making your own jam, when my youngest announced from the back seat that she was "definitely going to be sick very soon." Cue frantic map-checking, a near-miss with a tractor, and me performing an emergency stop outside what turned out to be the neatest compost heap in eastern Austria. Holiday memories, eh?

We eventually rolled up to our cottage in St Peter am Ottersbach just as the afternoon light was doing that golden thing across the vineyards. I had promised myself I would not be one of those people who gasps at holiday cottages, but honestly, the place was gorgeous. Proper wooden balconies, flower boxes bursting with red geraniums, and a view of rolling hills that looked almost suspiciously perfect, like someone had gone overboard on the pastoral Instagram filter.

The key was in a lockbox, which I managed to open on the third attempt after entering the code backwards, upside down, and once while holding my phone torch in my mouth. My husband found this hilarious until he walked straight into the low beam in the kitchen, which I also found hilarious. We were even.

The cottage had that brilliant mix of being properly equipped while still feeling like someone's actual home rather than a sterile rental. There were board games with slightly dog-eared boxes, a coffee machine that looked like it had seen some action, and a garden with a barbecue that immediately became the centre of my children's universe. Within twenty minutes of arrival, they had established a complex system for who got to carry the charcoal and were arguing about it with the intensity of seasoned estate agents negotiating a property deal.

I made the mistake of claiming the master bedroom with the en-suite before properly checking the shower situation. Turned out the family bathroom had the better water pressure, which my husband discovered while taking what he described as "the most aggressively therapeutic shower of his life." I got the weak dribble and a sudden moment of reflection about how I always rush to claim things without adequate research. Story of my life, really.

By evening, we were on those balconies with local wine and the children finally exhausted from running around the garden pretending to be farm animals. The air smelled of cut grass and woodsmoke from somewhere down the valley. Someone was probably burning garden waste properly, unlike whatever I would manage with that compost heap if left to my own devices.

The village itself was small enough that we could wander down for fresh bread in the morning without it feeling like an expedition. The bakery lady tolerated my GCSE German with good grace and sold me twice as many pastries as intended through the simple genius of smiling and nodding at everything I said.

That first evening, as the hills went purple and the bats came out, I realised how much I needed this. Not the dramatic escape or the life-changing revelation, just the gentle rhythm of cottage life where the biggest crisis is who forgot to bring the washing-up liquid and whether the barbecue will ever reach the right temperature. We had a week of this ahead of us, and already I could feel my shoulders dropping from somewhere up near my ears to their proper anatomical position.

The compost bin incident already felt like part of the family folklore, the sort of story that would get exaggerated at Christmas until I was apparently reversing at speed down a vineyard track with a child hanging out the window. Travel does strange things to memory, and to parents.

I sat there on that balcony, slightly chilly in just my t-shirt, too lazy to go in for a jumper, watching my husband attempt to teach the children a card game they were clearly too young for, and thought: this is exactly enough. No monuments, no must-sees, no itinerary. Just this slightly chaotic, perfectly ordinary moment in a Styrian village that most people will never hear of, and the quiet pleasure of being exactly where you are.