I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a single-track lane in rural Styria with a rental car the size of a small boat and a Sat Nav that had apparently given up on me entirely. The journey from Graz had been straightforward enough, or so I thought, until I took what I was certain was the correct turning and ended up waving apologetically at a local farmer who had to pull his tractor into a hedge to let me pass. Twice. On the same lane.

By the time I spotted the actual turning for our holiday home in Stainz, I was in that peculiar state of frazzled determination where you refuse to admit defeat but have also started quietly composing the complaint email in your head. My partner sat beside me with the studied patience of someone who had suggested stopping for directions three villages ago. We had been travelling since dawn, and the boot contained a week's worth of shopping that was rapidly defrosting into something resembling soup.

The property appeared at the end of a gravel track, and I will confess that my first thought was not charitable. It looked perfectly pleasant, of course, a solid Styrian farmhouse with the traditional wooden balcony and those characteristically wide eaves, but I was still smarting from my navigational humiliation and the fact that my left calf had developed a cramp from hovering over the clutch pedal for the final twenty minutes. I parked with theatrical precision, as if to prove that I had been in control the entire time, and promptly stepped out into a flowerbed.

The flowerbed, I should note, was very well maintained. I felt immediately guilty, examining my footprint in the dark soil and wondering whether Austrian hospitality extended to forgiving guests who trampled the herbaceous borders within thirty seconds of arrival. My partner was already at the front door, key in hand, wearing an expression I chose to interpret as sympathetic rather than amused.

The interior, however, stopped my self-pity in its tracks. The wooden beams were genuinely ancient, not the cosmetic sort you find in city restaurants that have been distressed by a design team. The kitchen smelled faintly of beeswax and something herbal, perhaps from the garden I had just assaulted. There was a proper stove, the kind that demands respect and a certain confidence with firewood, and windows that framed the surrounding hills with almost excessive generosity. I stood in the doorway of the sitting room, still holding my coat and one muddy shoe, and felt that particular shift that happens when travel exhaustion finally surrenders to something like contentment.

I should mention the balcony at this point, because it became immediately apparent that this was where we would spend most of our time. It ran the length of the house, furnished with a solid wooden table and chairs that looked as though they had witnessed decades of breakfasts. The view was entirely of rolling green, the sort of landscape that makes you feel slightly fraudulent for simply looking at it without having done any actual farming. I could see orchards in the middle distance, and what I later learned were typical Styrian vineyards on the south-facing slopes. The air carried that particular combination of cut grass and woodsmoke that seems exclusive to this corner of Austria.

My partner appeared with two glasses of something cold and local, and we stood there in silence for a moment, watching the evening settle over the hills. I thought about the journey, the wrong turns, the farmer's patient wave, the flowerbed. Travel has a way of compressing experience, I find, so that the mishaps and the beauty arrive almost simultaneously, and you cannot quite separate them into good and bad. The chaos of arrival had been entirely my own making, yet it had also delivered us here, to this particular moment, with the light fading and the first stars appearing above those generous eaves.

The cramp in my calf had subsided. The shopping survived, mostly. And I decided, standing on that balcony with my local wine and my muddy shoe abandoned by the door, that I would not mention the flowerbed in my review. Some things between a guest and a property are best left unrecorded.